


everybody talks

by teacupsandsheepskulls



Series: baby we don't talk (about the things you do when you mean to say i love you) [2]
Category: The Fugitive (Movies)
Genre: POV Outsider
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-02
Updated: 2020-06-22
Packaged: 2021-03-03 05:34:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 39,689
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24499501
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/teacupsandsheepskulls/pseuds/teacupsandsheepskulls
Summary: Sam Gerard is a force of nature whose default setting is stone-cold bastard. John Royce is an unrepentant jackass with a smart mouth and a stubborn streak as wide as the Midwest. This should end as all wars do: in devastation, pointless cruelty, and entirely too many casualties. All logic says they won’t become friends, given that they barely seem friendly. Certainly not good friends, and definitely not lovers. A few perspectives as to how a war ended up in love instead, and how love became a war worth fighting for.A series of companion pieces to "talking is what we do to each other with words (but baby we don't talk)".
Relationships: Samuel Gerard/John Royce (U.S. Marshals)
Series: baby we don't talk (about the things you do when you mean to say i love you) [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1763008
Comments: 3
Kudos: 5





	1. Special Agent Hannah Hill

**Author's Note:**

> *cues Panic at the Disco*: hey look ma I made it *awkwardly moonwalks out*

Hill knows she's not what most people would think of as Special Agent material. She herself is still surprised by the notion, sometimes.

About a week after Perry hires her, he walks by her desk, backtracks, asks what she's doing. When she says grunt work, he sighs, pulls up a chair, and talks her through the details of what she's doing. Then he looks her in the eye and says there is no grunt work, that no detail is too small. Everything she does is essential to the FBI, and he hired her because he knows she doesn’t overlook a single detail, because he knows she can do it.

Hill decides then and there that she'll do everything in her power not to let Agent Perry down.

Burkhardt is a golden retriever puppy in the body of an FBI agent. Wang, on the other hand, is a twig of a man with sarcasm where his bones ought to be. And then there’s Hill, who isn’t what most people would think of as Special Agent material. But she is self-aware enough to recognize that she hears more than most people realize. A virtue of being quiet.

They’re a good team, the four of them, but they’re running ragged with just four. One of Perry’s agents took a transfer to Denver shortly before Hill arrived, and while Perry was happy to snatch Hill from the Academy, the spot just above Hill remains vacant for months, requiring slightly more on-the-street knowledge of organized crime and a bit more seniority.

Which is how they acquire Special Agent John Royce from the New York field office, on a sparkling commendation from his former boss for his highly publicized work recapturing Mark Sheridan in Tennessee to stand trial for the brutal murder of two FBI agents, both of whom were Royce’s former teammates.

Hill is worried. So are Wang and Burkhardt. They’re a team, dammit, and they’re running ragged without an extra set of hands, but they work well together. The last thing they need is some hothead blustering in and fucking up the rhythm, not when the coming year promises a forest of Gambino cases.

Besides, there’s a small, childish part of her that worries she’ll get left behind, once Burkhardt and Wang have a new third to round out their dynamic.

Royce appears in their office on a Monday in a suit that’s surprisingly tasteful and well-pressed, given that he’s a public servant toward Hill’s end of the food chain. Probably from money, then, which does nothing to soothe her. He’s only a few years older than her, thirty maybe, with dark hair and dark eyes that have an unmistakable spark of mischief.

This will either go very well or very, very badly.

By the end of the day, Royce has gotten himself caught up on the workings of the team. By the end of the week, he’s almost completely caught up with their current caseload, hampered only by his lack of local knowledge of Chicago. By the end of the second week, the entire office has decided on three universally acknowledged truths about John Royce.

One, John Royce has impressively sharp elbows and an even sharper tongue. Two, John Royce is impressively good at his job. Three, John Royce has yet to acquire the political sensibility to make Truth #2 cancel out Truth #1, which is why half the office likes him and the other half does not and both halves agree he’s an incorrigible shit.

Perry complains that Royce is a pain in the ass, and so too do Burkhardt and Wang, but Hill likes Royce. He's sharp as a tack with an equally sharp sense of humor, and for all that he's a complete shit and that sharp sense of humor frequently gets him in trouble, he's also surprisingly aware of other people. Though, she supposes, perhaps not that surprising, given how good he is at managing the endless details of their cases and everyone around him. And for all that Perry, Burkhardt, and Wang complain that Royce (specifically, his inability to speak in anything but witty side comments) is a pain in the ass, they can’t argue with the results of that quick wit applied to their caseload.

By the end of the first month, Hill has her own set of universally acknowledged truths about John Royce.

One, John Royce has a stunning talent for landing himself in the middle of messes while wearing the wrong shoes for it and still emerging more or less unmuddied. Two, John Royce is a deeply private person. Three, Truth #1 is an excellent mask for Truth #2, because most of the time, people are too busy figuring out how the hell Royce manages to clean up around him to notice that they don’t actually know much of anything about him.

Hill does, though, by way of contrast. She knows, for example, that Burkhardt has a girlfriend, a sweet redheaded veterinarian he adores more than life itself and will definitely marry, who always strikes up a pleasant conversation with Hill anytime the lot of them grab dinner. She knows, for example, that Wang dotes on his nephew and shares with him a love of comic books and regularly takes him to see action movies on the weekends. She knows, for example, that Perry has been married twice and that his second wife, Victoria, has more than enough game for the both of them and ensures that the entire family still finds a way to carve out family dinner every night, even if it means Perry calling from his desk for twenty minutes to ask everyone about their day.

Somehow, in a month, she’s learned nothing of the sort about Royce. She knows he’s from New York and that he went to law school at Georgetown, which are resume facts. She knows that he’s a workaholic and knows case law like he wrote it himself, which are more resume facts. She knows that he keeps a picture of himself and a pretty redhead on his desk, which is just observation.

It’s not that he doesn’t like them--for all that Royce is good at misdirection, she’s never once gotten the sense that he doesn’t like them. It’s just that he seems completely content to remain friendly with them and invite nothing further. Besides, he has such a talent for pissing off Perry, Burkhardt, and Wang that they haven’t yet figured out not to take it personally and, as a consequence, have yet to try to get to know him better.

Which brings her back to Truth #2. Then again, Hill herself was skittish and private when she first joined and took a while to warm up to Burkhardt and Wang even though she always strove to impress Perry. Perhaps Royce is the same way.

Her only worry is what it might do to the team, if Royce remains a deeply private person once the rest of them learn not to take his bullshit personally.

Their first month with Royce are comparably quiet, so she hasn’t yet been able to test her theories about the consequences under stress. So when they get a call in the ugly hours of night about a train crash involving a prison bus transporting one of their Gambino witnesses, Jeremy Pulaski, her first thought is _would it kill them to crash during normal business hours?_ and her second is _please let this not go wrong_ , refusing to consider the ways in which it might go wrong.

They make it to the scene at the same time, Perry barking out instructions while he goes to deal with the local cops. By the look on his face, the local cops are both stupid and irritating. They glance at each other and head for the wreckage and have barely been at it five minutes when Wang mutters, "Oh, great, just what I needed at early o'clock.”

Hill looks up and sees a team of Marshals rolling in, led by a man who she can only assume is Deputy Marshal Sam Gerard. She's somehow managed to skate by without having to interact with Gerard or his team yet, but to hear the other agents describe him, Gerard is either the monster under the bed, the actual devil, or just a regular mean old bastard, none of which is diminished by the fact that he's apparently one of the best in the state at his job.

Perry loops back to them just as four of the Marshals peel off for the wreckage but one, a tiny black woman wearing a bandana who follows Gerard as he situates himself right in the middle of where Sheriff Rawlins is interviewing the surviving prison guard in front of TV cameras.

At least the legendary wrath of Gerard will be unleashed on someone who deserves it. Hill wonders if they’ll have anything left of Rawlins to send back to his wife. Hill doesn’t let herself wonder about what will happen when Perry has to fight with Gerard over jurisdiction (because one of the most important tenets of surviving Sam Gerard is to never, _ever_ get in a pissing match about jurisdiction). She doesn’t let herself think about who could draw their gun faster, because this isn’t the Wild West and that would be stupid.

Perry gets to them, reviews what they’re doing, and frowns. "Where's Royce?"

Hill looks up, freezes, and points--Royce is standing next to Gerard, clearly irritating the sheriff and looking for all the world as though he and Gerard are engaged in a pleasant cocktail hour chat, completely undeterred by the stony expression Gerard fixes on him.

"He's so going to die,” Burkhardt says, as if stating the sky is blue.

"Shame,” Wang replies, shaking his head, _poor bastard, isn’t it just a shame?_ “I was just starting to like him."

"Hey, what are those?" When Burkhardt and Wang don’t see where she’s pointing, she dives at the wreckage the same time the curly-haired Marshal does a few feet away and produces a pair of leg irons, matching the ones the curly-haired Marshal brandishes. Perry sighs and motions her to follow the Marshal, who is now walking directly toward Gerard and Royce.

 _Fuck fuck fucking fuck_. Hill wonders when she last called her mother to say she loved her, draws on her nerve, and soldiers forward to Gerard and Royce.

Gerard has a face angled like someone cut it out of a rock face with a chisel and deep-set, expressionless eyes that pass over her like the shadow of a predator. Hill does not shiver, because it’s over in a moment and Gerard takes the leg irons from the curly haired Marshal, informing the guard in a bored Texas lilt that the Marshals Service is always fascinated to find leg irons with no legs in them. She could listen to that accent all day, if she didn’t know who it belonged to.

It’s...almost an art form, watching Gerard work over the guard, especially because Royce matches his tempo perfectly. Hill kind of wishes she had popcorn. She could almost swear the tiny Marshal looks entertained, though she’s not sure what that says for Royce’s chances of not getting dead.

And when Gerard shouts to the crowd as a whole to search every residence, warehouse, hen house, out house, dog house and outhouse in a six mile radius, Hill has to blink back the shock from her face. Somehow, in the few minutes Royce was irritating both Rawlins and Gerard, he convinced Gerard to let the FBI take Pulaski while the Marshals handle Collins.

Hill decides, jogging back to the rest of them, that Royce must be a private person because he is secretly a supernatural entity. Or just batshit insane.

"Have you lost your mind?" Wang hisses at Royce when he returns to them, _finally_ , after Perry too emerged from talking to Gerard with his limbs intact. "That's Deputy Marshal Sam Gerard. You do not engage with Gerard, you do not talk to Gerard, you do not sneeze in Gerard's general direction."

"Unless you want to get eaten for breakfast," Burkhardt adds from the middle of the wreckage. Hill swears she can hear the Marshals snickering.

Royce, for his part, just looks amused. "Yeah, we've met."

Wang looks like Royce just said he’s met Charles Manson. "Wait, what do you mean you've met?"

"In Tennessee."

"And you're still alive?"

"I don't know, maybe the Swamp Thing threw him off his game," Royce quips cheerfully. The blonde marshal is definitely snickering. "Anyway, you're welcome. We've only got one escapee to catch tonight."

"Royce?" Perry barks.

"Yeah boss?"

"Shut up."

In Tennessee. During the hunt for Mark Sheridan. Hill files that away for later reference, and gets to work on the wreckage.

When it’s all over, when Arthur Collins has been removed from his girlfriend’s house in a body bag and Royce and Gerard have an unsubtle argument and the blonde Marshal, Renfro, drags them all out to drinks on the promise of buying the first round, Hill has decided that Royce is probably batshit insane. Mostly on account of Royce picking an argument with Sam Gerard after Sam Gerard shot a man dead right in front of him and nearly shot his own subordinate in the process. Also because Royce willingly spent five minutes in a quiet conversation with Gerard before Gerard drifted back to his own team to sit in silence, contributing to the conversation primarily through his eyebrows and the relative intensity of his glare.

She doesn’t know how Gerard’s team manages to work with him every day. In the dim light of McRory’s, his eyes are as black as they were at the train crash and no more emotional for the good cheer around him. One corner of his lip twitches exactly once at a ridiculous exchange between two of his deputies, Renfro and Henry, but otherwise, it’s like staring down a bottomless well, unsure of whether to drop a stone for the comfort of hearing the thud or back away for the fear that the stone would never land.

Somehow, Gerard’s team seems entirely unbothered by his stillness and quietness. If anything, they form a wall of noise and activity around him, as if walling him in. Or walling the rest of them out, for all that they’re nice and funny people who Hill does actually like, sitting in a bar far away from bad men in prison cells and black bags. Gerard is theirs, it seems, and so they form a protective wall of noise around his silence, though it’s unclear what they’re protecting him from, or why they think Gerard needs their protection.

She supposes that it’s a good sign the Marshals do seem to genuinely like Royce. Enough so that Renfro sincerely congratulated him on the promotion and made a bet with Newman that Royce was staying, crowing in delight to be proven right. All of them seem to like him, even the tiny Marshal, Poole, who seems like she would be completely unamused by Royce’s bullshit. Or like she can see straight through Royce’s bullshit and decided she liked what was hiding there, which is a point in Royce’s favor.

Hill watches them rotate through dragging him into the various bits and bobs of the conversation from time to time, going out of their way to step out of their conversations and arguments with the other FBI agents in order to drag Royce into the middle of it from his stance at the bar. The only one who doesn’t talk to Royce again is Gerard, except when he clinks their glasses together on his way out the door, just past the window where he can acceptably bow out early. They know each other, Hill thinks, and maybe they even work well together. But whatever happened in Tennessee--whatever just happened with Arthur Collins--is indication enough that they’re not friends.

Of course, batshit or not, Royce’s nerve or stone cold idiocy with regards to Sam Gerard does earn him more than a few points with everyone in the office, who have concluded in the afternoon and evening of gossip sown about Arthur Collins that Royce is either supernatural or supernaturally crazy. Hill knows this because Burkhardt and Wang attempt to wrangle the art of not getting annihilated by Sam Gerard out of Royce the second he shows up to work Friday morning. That Royce seems amused by their terror only adds to the effect.

“Oh come on,” Royce says, though she can tell by the spark in his eye that he thinks this is hilarious, “do you think he’s the boogeyman or something?”

“Yes,” Wang says, completely serious.

Royce doesn’t quite snort coffee out of his nose, but it’s a near thing. “He’s more bark than bite, once you get over the volume of the bark.”

“Spoken like a fool who’s never been bit,” Burkhardt says over his shoulder, from where he’s pinning photos to the board.

“What can I say,” Royce says sunnily, “I have a way with feral animals.” Hill’s not entirely sure if that means he’s strictly opposed to getting bitten, but then, it’s still hard to tell when Royce is having his way with them.

“First of all,” Perry grumbles as he drops into his chair, “never say that sentence again. Second of all, I don’t want to know.”

“Gerard,” Wang informs him, just for the put-upon sigh he gets in return.

Perry’s face says he definitely, 100%, does not want to know. 

“You’re insane,” Hill tells Royce.

“So I’ve been told,” he replies. He’s enjoying this, the shit.

“Definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result,” Burkhardt says, catching the marker Wang tosses him. “What does that make you in regards to Gerard?”

“Batshit insane,” Hill supplies.

Royce cackles for real this time.

And so passes Friday. By noon, Burkhardt and Wang have given up trying to corral Royce and instead resort to (figuratively) throwing things at him. That doesn’t work either, because Royce catches everything they throw at him with equal agility.

Hill supposes it’s just their luck, getting stuck with the one nutcase in Chicago who doesn’t spend a week quaking in his boots in the aftermath of Sam Gerard. If anything, Royce seems to have more spring in his step on Friday morning and is more cheerful than he has any right to be.

It persists well into the following Monday, which Wang dubs a cardinal Monday sin. Hill just thinks its impressive. Somehow, Royce’s lightness never quite leaves all day, as though over the weekend he shifted a step to the left and found his rhythm. And it persists well into the evening.

Hill likes to stay late. She's always been a night owl, and it gives her time to review details when the office is quiet while catching up on office scuttlebutt with the night janitors and security guards. There’s something to be said for the people no one notices, and noticing them helps her find out which way the wind is blowing before anyone else does. It helps that they know she’s not one to _share_ the gossip they tell her, just nod wanly without surprise when something she already knew comes to pass.

It’s a soothing ritual, especially during long cases. Burkhardt tells her she’s burning at both ends, but she’s not, really. Staying late is getting organized, assuring her boxes are checked. She’s caught more than a few minor but important details that way, so Perry lets her alone as long as there’s no indication she’s wearing herself out.

It’s also how she finally gets to know Royce, so to speak, after a month of work.

She discovered him on his first day in the office, when she made her usual loop through the office to bid goodnight to agents in various states of being out the door, to hear how the day closed, to see who’s going and who’s staying. To her surprise, there was Royce, with his desk light still on, as awake and focused on the files as he had been all day.

Still, she didn’t loop his way until the second week, and even then, she only waved on her way through, getting a collegial wave in return. Royce was friendly, yes, but his immediate return to the files in front of him said he had no interest in pleasant conversation. As he was every night Hill stayed late that first month--friendly, yes, but uninviting.

Tonight, though, something stops her from leaving Royce to his own devices. Instead, Hill makes a loop around the office to putter on her way to Royce’s desk. When she arrives, she makes sure he sees her, and offers to make a cup of tea from the kettle when she goes to the break room, as she often does for others who look like they’re in for an unusually long night.

He isn’t surprised by the offer, probably having heard her make it on previous nights to other agents up to their eyes in the muck, but he is certainly pleased to receive it. Of course, it’s Royce. “Depends on the kind of tea.”

Hill contemplates the merits of saying an absurd exotic tea he’d never heard of, then gives a pointed look at the case files spread eagle on his desk. “The kind that keeps you just awake enough not to do something stupid.”

That wins her a delighted cackle, which Hill is beginning to suspect might be the sign of a genuine Royce laugh. At her order to surrender his mug, though, he loses some of his steam--he doesn’t have one, at which point she remembered him relying on Styrofoam coffee cups most mornings.

“First rule of the Chicago office: get your own mug,” she tells him, “or a mug will be gotten for you.” And brings him back the ugliest spare mug in the cupboard, replete with yellow daisies.

He brings a Georgetown Law mug to work the following morning, but that night, the hideous yellow daisy mug appears on his desk full of tea after everyone else had gone home.

It’s…nice. Having a sustained in-joke with Royce. A sign that there’s a real person under the veneer who might be willing to come out and wave if given the opportunity. And if, in more than a month, Hill still learns almost nothing at all about him even after hours, it’s pleasant, having another person on her loop to chat with.

And so they return to business as usual, except now business as usual is complete with the periodic appearance of the ugly yellow daisy mug on Royce’s desk. Hill’s not surprised that Gerard never comes up, but she is relieved. If she had to guess, and she would be completely guessing, she would guess that Royce is relieved too, if only to be left alone.

In the week after the train crash, though, it becomes increasingly obvious that they’re going to need the Marshals again--specifically, Gerard’s team. The Oberetti case is a complete nightmare, and Gerard’s team has worked on enough overlapping parts of it that they have first claim on Marshal involvement. And by Monday, it’s clear that there’s no getting around Marshal involvement.

By the following Monday, it’s also clear that Perry is dancing around the problem. Because Sam Gerard is still Sam Gerard. On one hand, there’s no one better in Chicago to scare the Oberetti case into submission. On the other hand, it’s unclear whether the Arthur Collins incident is an indication that Gerard would be at all happy to be stuck with Royce again or if Gerard’s relative cooperation last time was a complete fluke and sending Royce again could create another Arthur Collins. Or if sending someone else is an invitation to turn the case into a massive headache.

Which means that all of them pass the week in increasing dread of who’s going to get sacrificed.

By Tuesday evening, though, Perry comes to a decision, leaning out of his office to bark, “Royce! Congratulations. You’re going to the Marshals’ office tomorrow morning.” 

“Not that I’m not honored, sir, but may I ask why me?” Royce, damn his idiocy, doesn’t look as afraid as he ought to.

“Because Gerard’s met you twice and hasn’t shot your smartass.”

“And that qualifies me to deal with him?” For once, Royce looks appropriately skeptical.

“That and you’re fresh meat,” Burkhardt says, from where he’s definitely smirking into his mug. 

“Bottom of the food chain,” Wang adds. As though they both weren’t terrified of being drafted for the task.

“Don’t tempt me,” Perry says, casting a weary glare at both of them that they all know portends no threat. “You’re ironing out the Oberetti files with them, and you’re staying until you finish.”

“Or when Gerard finishes with you,” Burkhardt mutters.

Perry ignores him. “Don’t let them walk all over you. Or I’ll be walking all over you when you show your face here next. And Royce?”

“Yeah boss?”

“While I know your native language is snark, spend the night studying English. Or else Gerard will rip you to bits and my case files while he’s at it.” He fixes Royce with a look that does portend real threat. “And when he sends the bits back to me in a box I’ll sew you back together and rip you apart myself, and you’ll spend the next week in the rolling in the shit with our stupid gangbangers. Clear?”

“As crystal,” Royce sighs.

Perry raises an eyebrow. “You’ve got files to organize for the morning. Get busy.”

Royce gets busy.

“Twenty bucks says he comes back without a limb,” Wang mutters.

“Twenty bucks says you’re wrong,” Hill replies. They even shake on it, while Burkhardt pretends to disapprove and Perry pretends not to notice.

She really hopes she’s right. Because it’s comforting to buy into the urban myth of the last week that Royce’s supernatural talent for emerging from catastrophes unharmed supernaturally extends to the legendary wrath of Gerard. Besides, she’s not quite sure how it would look to have Gerard ship Royce back to them knocked down twenty pegs, but she can only imagine it would be terribly sad and pathetic, like an Army dog that’s been shot, and she’s actually started to like that poor bastard Royce. For all that he has the self-preservation instincts of headless chicken with regards to Sam Gerard.

When Royce returns on Monday an even worse shit because he knew they expected him not to be, Wang gapes and Hill collects her winnings primly victorious. Even though she’s also gaping. In her head.

That seems to be the moment that Burkhardt and Wang decide Royce might just crazy enough to be worth keeping.

It’s a relief, really, that they can finally see past some of Royce’s bullshit. It loosens some of the tension they’ve been carrying for the last month and a half, now that Burkhardt and Wang have decided to crack jokes with Royce instead of feeling out his boundaries.

Even so, Royce remains steadfastly private, volunteering only a few more details than they had before. For now, at least, that’s alright--Burkhardt, Wang, and Perry have decided that they’re going to keep him, which temporarily renders his graceful misdirection about anything truly personal a forgivable quirk. After all, they have plenty else to talk about, with all these damn Gambino cases, and Royce’s clear interest in learning about Burkhardt’s girlfriend and Wang’s nephew leaves them more than happy to talk about both.

Still, Hill sees enough of Royce after hours to know that he doesn’t really have friends in Chicago, but for a small handful of old friends from childhood and college, fellow New York transplants. And she hopes, musing over late-night tea and case files with Royce working in amicable silence a few feet away, that he does make friends, hopefully with them. There’s a decent person hiding under his many layers of bullshit, and in any case, friends would help cushion his perennially sharp elbows.

So she's surprised, one night, to hear Royce on the phone, saying, "Have you eaten?" and “If you want company…” and making dinner plans with someone.

Hill can only assume, given that it’s late o’clock on a Friday night, that it's his girlfriend, and she’s glad that he's found someone who can tolerate the long hours for at least a little while, especially given that he hasn't made many friends yet. She’s heard Royce mention a childhood friend of his from New York, Annie Eastman, an emergency room doctor at Cook County Hospital, and Hill has seen him meet a pretty redhead in scrubs a few times when he leaves the office, her face matching the photo on Royce’s desk, who Hill assumes must be Annie. He says they’re just friends, that they got thrown together as kids and Annie imprinted on him when he helped her survive medical school and now, he says with mock irritation, they can’t seem to be rid of each other.

But then, he routinely meets her after work anytime they’re both free (even at insane hours of night) and keeps a photo of the two of them on his desk.

Men can be dense that way.

Two Fridays later, when she hears him on the phone making dinner plans, she thinks it must be Annie. She recognizes the name of the restaurant he repeats, clearly listening to Annie pitch it. It’s a cute little Italian place, a pleasant place to take dates that’s out of the way. Royce did mention that he was planning on staying in this weekend, but then, maybe Annie got a break. Or traded someone for it, to make space to take Royce to the good little Italian place on Friday night.

It’s sweet, she thinks, that Royce has someone to drag him out of the office to spend his Fridays properly. So when Royce stops by her desk to say his goodbyes, she grins and wishes him a good weekend. He’s got a spring in his step when he leaves, and she resolves to ask him about his weekend on Monday, to try and encourage him to see that he’s just as welcome to talk about his girlfriend as Burkhardt and Wang are to talk about theirs.

On Monday, though, when she asks if Royce did anything fun over the weekend, he says he stayed home.

"No? Didn't catch up with Annie or anything?"

"Hmm? Oh, no, Annie's had 12-hour night shifts at the ER all week. I haven't seen her since…” he pauses to squint at the ceiling, as if counting calendar days by the tiles, “last Wednesday, I think."

Royce isn't lying, that much is obvious. But that would mean his girlfriend isn't Annie, which wouldn’t make sense. As far as she knows, Royce doesn’t have many things he does outside of work, beyond his Friday dinners, and she knows from working with him that he has very little time to meet new people.

And sure, Hill could ask. But Royce, while friendly, doesn’t seem all that inclined to _make friends_. That’s fine. Hill can respect that--they spend enough hours around each other that the man deserves a break. But it does mean that it would be extremely creepy for her to ask about his regular Friday dinners with his girlfriend and if those plans involve Dr. Annie Eastman, given that he’s never mentioned his girlfriend or regular Friday plans with said girlfriend. Or any sort of regular Friday plans, for that matter.

So Hill could ask, but it would make her sound like a stalker. And that would be weird. And she does actually like Royce and wants to be friends with him at some point, eventually, which would be hampered if she made it weird by revealing herself as a creep.

So she doesn’t ask, and it does not become her pet puzzle. Just a...routine observation. On the plus side, if Annie Eastman isn’t Royce’s girlfriend and they are, in fact, purely platonic friends, that gives Hill the freedom to imagine a world in which her brain doesn’t short-circuit in the presence of pretty redheads and she could walk up to Annie Eastman and strike up a casual conversation in which she casually floated the notion of getting drinks sometime.

Of course, she’s in this world, and in _this_ world, her brain short-circuits around pretty redheads to produce a continuous litany of awkward and stupid sentences that make her seem like a gremlin recently emerged from the sewers of Chicago to join society, at which point she stammers and flees. Which would be entirely too embarrassing around Annie Eastman, who is childhood friends with Royce, who Hill sees on a daily basis and does actually want to be friends with. Besides, this would only confirm Burkhardt and Wang’s stupid theory that the entire team has a weird fixation on pretty redheads, not realizing how accurate the statement is in reference to Hill.

 _I need a hobby_ , she thinks with despair, after following that thought train to its conclusion. Hill leaves the office fifteen minutes later, because she’s not getting anything else done now anyway and she’s clearly reached the time of night where it feels entirely too pathetic to sit alone at her desk late on a Friday night.

The Friday dinners are irregular, though Hill is still glad to hear Royce making them. They only seem to be interrupted by extremely late cases, or when Royce gets thrown to the Marshals office. Perry likes to ship him there, on the increasingly frequent occasions that they’re stuck with the Marshals in general and Sam Gerard in particular thanks to the Hydra swarm of Gambino cases. Hill can only hope, with some dismay, that Royce’s plans aren’t interrupted by his sudden change in work scenery, or at least that one of the Marshals is nice enough to let him borrow a phone. They’re probably nice enough to do it, but Hill can’t imagine, coming in on a Friday to see that Royce has once again been gifted to the Marshals Service, that she could ever feel comfortable making date night plans knowing Sam Gerard is on the same floor.

Naturally, Perry lets her know that very afternoon that she’s being shipped along with Royce to the Marshals on Monday. Burkhardt, at least, is nice enough to pat her on the shoulder and look sympathetic. Wang just wants horror stories, because he’s a gossip at heart.

“They’re really not going to kill you,” Royce tells her, in a tone that could be bored, not paying attention, or just his usual level of sarcasm.

“How do you know?”

“Because murder is illegal.”

“Anyone ever told you you have a terrible bedside manner?”

“This isn’t a bedside and I’m not a doctor,” Royce replies, holding out a file without looking up. Probably not paying attention, then. Asshole.

Hill half expects to be met by Gerard himself at the door as if being welcomed into the gates of hell, and she’s mostly (not really) talked herself into staying calm. But Newman of the perennial hangdog eyes is the one waiting for them, probably because his youth and curls make him seem nonthreatening. He gives her a wave and immediately cracks a terrible joke at Royce, who informs him that it’s too early on a Monday for humor that bad.

The rest of the team sans Gerard is waiting for them upstairs, reintroducing themselves with a wave apiece. Then Gerard blows through like a storm wind, asking what they’ve got even though Royce and Hill clearly haven’t set down the boxes yet. By Royce’s eye roll, this is a common occurrence.

The morning is surprisingly informative, even if it shaves a few years off the end of her life. Biggs and Henry are a matched set, Turner and Hooch style. Add in Newman and they’re surprisingly efficient. Add in Renfro and they’re a menace to society, as evidenced by the first time she’s on the Marshals side of the phone call when Biggs, Henry, and Renfro take turns shouting sometimes-helpful-but-mostly-not things just because they happen to know the FBI team is on the other end of the receiver. Burkhardt and Wang would kill her for it, but from this end, it’s hilarious.

Renfro is the one who makes the most effort to loop her in. Granted, he’s also a smartass with a strong New Jersey accent who could probably be a sci-fi villain if he set his mind to it, but for some reason he set his mind to being a U.S. Marshal instead. She would like Renfro best, if not for Poole.

Because while Renfro is hilarious and fun, Poole is a five-foot-four petite black woman with a shiny Marshals badge and shinier nerves of steel. She could take all of them with one arm tied behind her back and still have a dozen fugitives back in their cells in time for her morning coffee. She's kind of everything Hill wants to be when she grows up.

Poole’s the one who takes pity on her. Poole’s version of taking pity on her is call Hill to her desk, clarify a detail, shred her with the cool detachment of a surgeon’s scalpel, and then look her in the eye and ask, calmly, “Do you know what just happened?”

Hill blinks at the case notes, then at Poole. “…you just corrected my mistake?”

“No. I just walked all over you,” Poole says, as if informing her that the sky is blue. “Do you know why?”

“...no?”

“Because you let me.” She nods to Gerard’s door, as if gesturing to a blackboard. “The secret to dealing with Sam? Have a spine.” The assessing look Poole gives her says Poole will be disappointed otherwise, and one should strive never to disappoint Poole. 

Hill does her best. She doesn’t succeed, because Gerard is legitimately frightening, but the nod of approval she gets from Poole when she manages to respond to Gerard without shrinking away is reward enough.

It’s…not awful, actually.

And somehow, that first performance was good enough that it keeps happening. Not every time, because Royce is often sent to the Marshals, but every second or third time.

Perry tells her it’s because he needs someone to make sure Royce is toeing the line, to reinforce Royce, and also because she won’t be too abrasive to Gerard (translation: Perry probably won’t get a phone call from an irritated Gerard). Hill is starting to understand why the other agents think Gerard might be the actual devil and why his talents are universally regarded even among those who are certain he’s the actual devil--he has little patience for anything other than the best and will challenge you for the whole world to see if you can’t back up what you say. She’s also starting to understand why Perry picked her instead of Wang or Burkhardt, though she’s not grateful for the honor.

It’s on one such occasion in the Marshals office that Hill looks up, startled, to hear Royce say, “Have you eaten yet?” and “If you want company…” But he’s not on the phone this time--he’s standing in Gerard’s office door like he belongs there, and after a moment Gerard emerges to leave the office with Royce, continuing their low conversation that apparently started when Royce appeared in Gerard’s office door.

That takes a solid ten minutes to process.

Royce said it like he said it every other time she’s heard him say it on the phone--like it’s comfortable, a habit. Something he does frequently and asks often with the certainty that he’ll get a positive answer, and she’s heard him enough to know that he does.

Except. Except he just asked that to Sam Gerard like it was a habit, like it’s something he does frequently and is more comfortable than any normal person has a right to be around Sam Gerard.

She considers if that means Gerard and Royce are friends. Except, she didn't think they were on friendly enough terms to even grab dinner together. They bicker just this side of properly arguing as often as they look at each other, and Hill always assumed Gerard’s blank-faced looks in response to Royce’s nonsense meant he tolerated Royce at best, insofar as he’s deigned it a waste of his time to take a few minutes to gnaw on Royce as a dog would a bone.

She supposes, perhaps, that they hit it off in Tennessee, though hunting for your former partner's killer doesn't seem conducive to making friends. Nor does Sam Gerard as a concept. Besides, Royce has talked about Tennessee only a handful of times, and with enough discomfort that it's clearly not a period in his life he's keen to recall. And no matter what way she spins it, the idea of two friends grabbing dinner together at all ungodly hours of night doesn't quite click, unless they happened to be both old and good friends. She knows they're not old friends, and she didn't even think they _were_ friends, never mind good ones.

They don't seem like good friends. In fact, they don't give any outward indication that they're anything more than friendly.

But, now that Hill inspects it, there's a closeness under the bickering that doesn't make sense, if indeed they're nothing more than friendly. A certain fondness, in Royce's eyes. A certain gentleness in Gerard's she didn't think the man capable of, though he hides it masterfully, trotting it out only every once in a while for his own team in nonverbal gestures like remembering favorite doughnuts and lowering his bark an octave when he knows one of them has a headache from a long night.

And once she tallies the number of times she's heard Royce make dinner plans with who she now assumes must be Gerard...it doesn't make sense why they would go to such lengths not to seem anything more than friendly, if indeed they are good friends. As far as Hill knows, there couldn't be any harm in anyone knowing that they are good friends. After all, Gerard is good friends with Renfro, and close with all of his team. It doesn't make sense what's different about Royce.

So she watches, and mulls.

Another Friday comes and finds them all elbow-deep in a case. Royce was on the phone with the Marshals this morning and back and forth with them yesterday, so it’s nice, Hill thinks, to have him back in their own office, cracking dry jokes with Burkhardt and Wang. Even Perry is still laughing when they rock paper scissors and send Burkhardt and Wang as a pair to collect lunch.

Then Royce gets a phone call.

Hill knows as soon as she sees his face that something is wrong, hissing at Burkhardt and Wang to shut up when they come in horsing around. Royce is pale when he hangs up the phone, staring at it like he doesn’t know it exists. 

After a moment, Hill tiptoes up to him. He looks even worse up close. “Royce?” He blinks up at her without recognition. He’s somewhere else, Hill knows. Hopefully not so far that they can’t reel him back to safety, though she doesn’t know what he needs safety from, or if they’re qualified to reel him back. “Everything okay?”

“Yeah, um,” Royce catches himself and stares back at his phone. “No. No it’s not.”

That, finally, gets Burkhardt and Wang’s attention. They set lunch down on the table and approach slowly, like they’re not sure they should. “What’s going on?” Burkhardt asks, in the tone he uses with tetchy suspects.

Royce presses his mouth into a white line, and for a moment, Hill thinks he won’t answer, that they’ll have to fish it out of him with a cane pole. Then he says quietly, carefully, “A friend of mine from New York. He killed himself yesterday.”

Hill marches over and hugs him, because she can’t think of what else to do. Royce tries and fails to smile at her when she lets go. “Go talk to Perry. We’ll be here.”

Twenty minutes later, Royce and Perry emerge from Perry’s office looking grim. Perry ships him home for the rest of the day, informing the three of them that Royce will have to fly to New York in the morning and will be out until Tuesday.

Hill isn’t sure it’s a good idea, watching Royce’s retreating back, even though there’s no question that Royce will be completely useless to them in the office. 

After some discussion with Burkhardt and Wang, they each agree to call him at home at intervals, to make sure he’s alright. She’s supposed to go first, but she doesn’t get the chance, because Perry informs her that she’ll be going to the Marshals’ office in Royce’s place on Monday under orders not to piss off Gerard too badly, to just hold the fort together until Royce comes back to help her on Tuesday. Which leaves her the rest of the day to figure out rhyme or reason in Royce’s organizational system, worrying even more when Wang and Burkhardt tell her Royce didn’t pick up when they called.

It’s the kind of thing someone shouldn’t be left alone with, and Royce will be alone with it all day. Even though they’re colleagues, not friends, and Royce needs good friends right now. She considers calling Annie Eastman and in two seconds of harebrained desperation even considers calling Gerard, but it’s not her place to do that. They’re colleagues, not friends. So all she can do is leave messages in Royce’s voicemail and hope that he’s called the right friends for this, whoever they are.

Monday is somehow worse than expected. Gerard is in a worse mood than usual, which means she's more nervous than usual, on top of being distracted by thinking about whether Royce is alright. By the end of Monday, she's certain he wants to wring her neck. The only thing that keeps her going is that she can’t create a complete disaster for Royce to return to after the funeral, and the clear thought that she may have to wring Sam Gerard’s neck if his mood is this foul when Royce returns from his funeral.

She walks into the Marshals office Tuesday morning considering her relative likelihood of success only for Poole to tell her that all her files have been moved. Into Gerard’s office. Poole watches her cautious approach while sipping her coffee, which is the only reason Hill makes herself stand up straight.

 _You’re doing this for Royce_ , she reminds herself, and hunkers down to make sense of the mess in front of her until Gerard gets there.

She doesn’t have to wait long. Royce arrives thirty minutes after her and has about five minutes for Newman and Henry to ask if New York is reclaiming their pet FBI agent before Gerard barks, “Royce!” Then they’re both in Gerard’s office and Gerard points at the mess in front of Hill.

“Start unfucking that,” he says, settling in behind his desk. Hill would be offended by that, except that Royce is plainly relieved to hide in Gerard’s office with the door partially closed. It stays that way all day, and Gerard largely lets them alone, warding off or distracting most people who try to set foot in the office.

It takes a while to process that she might be witnessing the Sam Gerard equivalent of being kind.

He stays as their guard dog until lunch, when he vanishes after murmuring something about returning with food. Hill checks no one is around before asking, quietly, “You okay?”

Royce looks up from his files with an exhausted smile. If she had to guess, this might be the first time he’s been both awake and sober in 48 hours. “I’ll be alright. Thanks Hill.”

“Anytime.”

Royce jerks his head in the direction Gerard just went. “He didn’t terrorize you too badly, did he?”

“Nah. His bark’s worse than his bite, once you get over the volume of the bark.”

That gets her a tired but real laugh. A good step, then. “You know I was full of shit when I said that, right?”

She snorts. “You’re always full of shit, Royce.” That wins her another tired laugh.

By the end of the day, Hill feels like a third wheel. It’s a common sensation around Royce and the Marshals, but it’s worsened when it’s just Royce and Gerard, especially when Gerard isn’t distracting them with his Big Dog schtick. She prepares to go home but is stopped, instead, by Renfro and Royce, who have apparently also captured Gerard.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Renfro says, falling into step beside her with a grin until she gives in and stops to talk to them.

“Back to my own home?”

“Nope,” Renfro says cheerfully. “We’re taking Royce for a drink to celebrate his second escape from Manhattan.”

Hill glances between Renfro and Royce, who looks bemused and clearly ready to be brought along. “And you’re stopping me because I’m coming?”

“Survived the day with Sam, didn’t you?” Renfro says, grinning at Gerard’s quiet snort. “That’s worth a reward in itself.”

“Guess that mean’s you’re buying,” Gerard retorts, starting to walk toward the elevator.

“Pretty sure being stuck with you means you owe her a drink, Sammy,” Renfro calls after him.

“He only pretends he doesn’t want to be brought along,” Royce informs her.

They carry on like that all the way down the elevator, and it almost feels like she’s part of it, even though she just watches Renfro and Royce go back and forth as if watching a tennis match, Gerard a quiet presence beside them.

Renfro has just given directions to the bar of choice when a voice calls, “John!” followed quickly by a pretty redhead in scrubs, who jogs up and hugs Royce. There are at least three disparate worlds colliding in Hill’s brain, but not enough to miss Gerard bristle and hide it not quite fast enough when Royce lets go of the pretty redhead and turns back to them.

Which is how Hill is introduced to Annie Eastman for the first time. As is Deputy Renfro. And Gerard.

Who is…being bizarrely agreeable about it?

Until, suddenly, he’s not, and when he’s not, he’s snapping at Renfro for asking if he thinks Annie Eastman might be Royce’s...something. Then Gerard is striding away so that Renfro drags her to jog after him, even though she’s pretty sure it’s a terrible idea to follow Gerard right now. Even though she can’t, for the life of her, figure out why Gerard would be angry about Annie Eastman being Royce’s anything.

Until it clicks, at the worst possible moment (getting herded into a table opposite Gerard) that there’s not enough room for Annie Eastman to be Royce’s something if Gerard is already Royce’s something. Hill has to hide her face behind her hair when that thought registers and almost chokes on her drink as suddenly Friday dinners click into place too, because she’s suddenly certain both that Gerard is Royce’s something and that if she looks up now, Gerard’s black eyes would know every thought marching through her brain about what that means about Gerard and Royce.

And then he would _definitely_ kill her.

She doesn’t have long to sit on that concept, because something changes after Annie Eastman. The day after Annie Eastman, in fact.

Suddenly, Royce and Gerard are cool to each other. And as the weeks go by, cool turns into snappish turns into vicious. If they were dogs, she thinks, there would be chunks of bloodied fur all over the walls. Royce's calls for dinner late on Friday peter out, then halt altogether.

Maybe they were...something before. But they're not now. That, Hill thinks, or there's some kind of crazy unhealthy hate sex happening there, then thinks she's spent entirely too many hours around Wang.

There’s a week where Perry takes pity on all of them and keeps Royce in their own office. Well, taking pity insofar as they aren’t subjected to Gerard’s black moods, which are apparently as endless as biblical plague and only grow worse in Royce’s presence. On the other hand, that also means that they’re stuck with Royce in person. It’s surprising, how much she feels the absence of what little non-openness was between them as soon as Royce beats it away to build a brick wall in its place.

Without even the veneer, all that’s left is Royce’s workaholic habits and his tendency to take out his pent up viciousness on them. It does wonders for their work, but it’s also akin to working around a pinless grenade--the only way to survive is by constant vigilance and then hoping your aim is good enough to do more damage to the intended target than yourself.

So when Perry calls all of them into his office on a Thursday afternoon and informs them they’re being called in to assist Deputy Gerard’s team protect Judge O’Connor from a potential mob hit at a charity event over the weekend, Hill knows in her bones that someone is going to get hurt.

The car ride to the Marshals office is a silent conversation of mouthed words and vague pantomime with Wang and Burkhardt, enough to know that they’re just as worried about the blast radius as she is. And if she had to guess by Perry’s face when he meets Detectives Kelly and Rosetti on their way up, Perry’s worried too.

As they settle in with the Marshals to figure out how screwed they are, Hill can almost swear she smells ozone. Then again, that might just be the tension rolling off of Royce, which somehow went up ten notches as soon as they set foot in the building.

She jumps a foot in the air when Gerard’s bark of, “What have we got, people?” heralds his arrival. Even so, as they settle into the meeting, Gerard reminds her of nothing so much as a cornered and injured animal, though that might be because he looks like he hasn’t slept in a month.

This does not stop him from snapping at everyone, but especially at Royce, who responds to every successive snap with more sharpness than before.

 _Please, Royce, just leave him alone_ , she prays. Of course, to her dawning horror, she hears Royce say, "Well I'm sorry you can't shoot this problem and make it go away, I'm sure that's very frustrating for you,” and sees Gerard’s eyes go cold and closed, a black wall between him and the world.

It's a cruel remark with the taste of an old wound, and it's completely uncharacteristic of Royce. Also, she's pretty sure Gerard is actually going to kill him this time, assuming Renfro and Newman don't get there first. Poole plants herself directly in Gerard’s way and shoves him in the direction of the coffee machine.

Then Hill thinks _Poole_ is going to kill Royce, judging by the violent death stare she fixes on him.

Royce stares right back, defiant because he has no sense of self-preservation where Gerard is concerned. A few beats pass, then Poole shakes her head in disgust and sits back down, turning away from the FBI agents in a clear gesture of dismissal.

"What the _fuck_ , Royce?" Burkhardt hisses.

“Stay out of it, Burkhardt,” comes the mutter back.

“Royce.” Hill didn’t know Perry could look that pissed. “Shut up. Now.”

Later, after an entire day of trying to organize the world’s worst security assignment while tiptoeing around the minefield that is Royce and Gerard at each other’s throats, she hears the tail end of Perry ripping into Royce for that little performance, after Gerard has left the building to terrorize CPD into competency and Gerard’s team is entirely too busy not to be listening. "I don't know what your problem is, Royce, and honestly I don't care. We need Judge O'Connor alive and unharmed, and we can't do it without Gerard's team. So either shape up or ship out. Clear?"

"Yes sir."

"And Royce? If you choose the latter, you can consider yourself unemployed."

"Yes, sir." Royce’s voice is hollow in a way that worries Hill more than his earlier comment. He’s thinking about the consequences, but not as much as he should.

The Hilton is worse than the blueprints promise. They’re completely overwhelmed, and the only reason they can keep track of Judge O’Connor is because Kelly and Rosetti are stationed on top of her. The only good thing is that the job has brought Gerard and Royce into irritable cooperation, because they are law enforcement and they both have a job to do.

She knows as soon as a hotel staffer makes for Kelly that something is wrong. As soon as Gerard issues orders, Hill moves into action to try to stop anyone else coming in, heading for the back of the lobby toward the staff entrances to check those too, using her elbows to try to get through the people in her way.

Then three shots go off, and the lobby descends into chaos.

She's cutting through the crowd, trying to get an angle on the shooter. She breaks into a pocket of space near the bar and sees Royce, frozen for a half-second and looking at the scene in front of him, at Gerard with a gun pointed at him and no gun in his hands, as though he’s seeing a ghost.

Then his face settles into steely determination as he draws his gun and steps calmly between Gerard and the shooter, as if that's exactly where he belongs.

Something clicks into place in the back of her brain, and as she throws herself through the crowd to try to get to the shooter with a wary eye toward the second-story gallery, she can only hope Royce figures it out too.

Preferably _before_ Gerard murders him.

Which is a realistic possibility, given the two sentences of a shouting match that escape as soon as Poole carts the shooter away. Hill dives for Royce’s arm the same moment Newman dives for Gerard, hauling them bodily apart in opposite directions.

“Are you insane?” she hisses, refusing to get out of the way when he shakes her off.

“Fuck off, Hill,” he snaps.

“Fuck you,” she snaps back. “What is your problem? Because in case you forgot, we’re a fucking team. So if you’re going to take stupid risks and expect us to save your dumb ass, you’d better start talking.”

“I don’t need anyone to save me,” he snarls, suddenly in her face. “And all of us? We’re not a team. You’re a team. I’m just some asshole your team got stuck with.”

The only thing that stops her from decking him is the voice in her head chanting that Royce is lashing out, that he’s hurting, that he’s yanking on her biggest fears to try to push her away. It’s a really small voice, though. “Go find Perry. Try not to get shot on the way.”

 _Fuck off_ hits her back as she walks away, louder this time, but she doesn’t turn around. They’ve got an idiot judge to secure.

Perry nearly murders Royce himself, when he’s not in Gerard’s face every time Gerard snaps at someone, which is practically every sentence. It’s a relief when Biggs and Henry march Gerard out and Perry orders Royce to stay with the goddamn judge if he wants to keep his goddamn badge, because now, at least, they can stop wasting half their attention on keeping these stupid bastards from killing each other.

After an hour, though, Perry hauls Royce to his car too and tells him not to show his face again until Monday and not to show up Monday unless he’s got his shit together.

It takes another hour to sort through the mess and confirm there’s nothing more they can do until they all have fresh eyes, at which point Renfro straightens and informs them all that he needs a drink or twenty and is willing to buy a round, to universal concurrence. Perry bows out, on account of setting up protection at the judge’s house until they can verify who their shooter is and what happened tonight. He does catch Hill before she follows the others though, glancing after the rest of them. “Whatever’s going on…keep track of everyone, would you?”

It’s his way of asking her to take care of things, when he knows he can’t go with them. “Yes sir.”

Perry nods and lets her go to jog after the others.

They make it to McRory’s and Renfro does buy a round. That’s when it gets awkward.

Because they’re all just…staring at each other. They’ve been brought here to talk, about something they all know but won’t say, and they don’t know how much the others know.

So they just keep…staring at each other.

Suspicious.

Waiting.

And waiting.

And waiting.

"Oh for fuck's _sake_.” They all turn to Hill, startled that she’s the one who spoke first, and somehow that makes her angrier. “Royce and Gerard. We're here because of Royce and Gerard. We all know they're probably not just friends. Or, they were, before whatever the fuck just happened."

 _Fucking finally_ , Poole mutters into her beer.

But it’s Renfro who surprises her. "Yeah, we are. And if anyone has a problem with that, you can get the fuck out right now."

"Hey fuck you, man," Wang snaps, "why do you assume we would have a problem with that?"

"And why do you assume they’re not just friends?” Burkhardt asks.

 _Morons,_ Hill thinks, but Renfro speaks for her. “Christ, you’re not that dense.”

Henry just stares at the ceiling for a minute, shrugs, and nods, apparently satisfied by his mental calculus.

“Wait, seriously?” This from Biggs, looking at Henry in utter confusion. “You mean Sam? Our Big Dog?”

Henry just stares at him, unimpressed.

They have a nonverbal conversation, primarily via mouthed half-words on Biggs’ part and eyebrows on Henry’s part. It ends after a minute with Biggs staring into the middle distance, his face scrunched for a second. “Huh. Sam. Who’d have thought?”

“Sam, sure,” Newman adds, “but Royce though?”

“What about Royce?” Henry asks, looking no more impressed than he did with Biggs.

“I mean, I could see Sam having a thing for Royce, sure,” Newman says, as though this half of it was the most plainly obvious thing in the world. He’s more perceptive than Hill gave him credit for. “But Royce having a thing for Sam?”

“The hell, Noah?” Under any other circumstances, it would be heartening how fast Renfro rises to defend Gerard’s honor.

“Just,” Newman waves his hands in front of him like white flags, “I mean, it’s Sam, right? And we love him and all, but he’s--”

“Hey, watch it!”

"Boys." Poole doesn't raise her voice, but they all still snap to attention.

"So…” all eyes snap to Hill, “what do we do?"

There’s a minute of nothing, then Renfro sighs.

"Nothing yet." Renfro downs his drink. For fortitude, probably. "I'll check on Sam in the morning. See if he'll tell me anything."

"Since when does Sam volunteer anything?" Newman asks.

"Other than a swift kick in the ass," Biggs mutters.

Renfro just shakes his head. "Something's wrong.”

“Isn’t that what we’re talking about?” Wang says.

“I’m not sure. Maybe if tonight hadn’t happened, I would’ve said that’s what we’re talking about.”

“What _are_ you talking about?” Poole says, before they can dive into another circle.

“I dunno.” Renfro looks between his team, like he can find the missing words between them. “We’ve all noticed it, right? Sam’s been worse lately. Since before Royce got to Chicago, even.” They all nod with variations on somber expressions. The sudden image of Gerard’s blank eyes from that first night in McRory’s leaps into Hill’s mind, and for some reason, she has the sense that this, whatever it is that they all know about, is why they form a protective wall around Gerard.

 _What the hell have you gotten yourself into this time, Royce?_ she thinks, because this might be too much for them to reel him back from. 

But Renfro is talking again. “I dunno if it’s the Royce thing or something else or the Royce thing tangled with something else, but something's wrong. He won't react well if we corner him. Just let me talk to him first. We'll figure out what to do from there."

“What about Royce?” Newman asks, and the Marshals all turn once more to the FBI agents.

Hill looks at Burkhardt and Wang, having their own silent conversation. When they turn to her, unsure, she sighs. “We’ll leave him alone for now. Give him Sunday to decompress. I’ll talk to him if I need to.”

Even Burkhardt looks skeptical. “It’s Royce.”

“That’s why we’re leaving him alone for now.” Hill turns to Renfro, suddenly wishing she got a stronger drink. “He works late nights with me a lot. If talking with Gerard doesn’t work, I’ll talk to Royce then.”

It’s not a good plan, but it’s a plan. Hill doesn’t tell them that she doesn’t have the first damn clue what to say to Royce, but the look she exchanges with Renfro says he’s not quite sure what to say to Gerard either.

Royce shows up on Monday looking like a scarecrow in a well-tailored suit. Hill is starting to think that his clothes get more pressed and refined the less comfortable he is. Worse is the fact that he’s startlingly silent. Hill didn’t quite process how much he talked until now, in the absence of it. The office is too quiet when Perry collects them to go to the Marshals office, each of them steeling themselves in the silence.

When they get there, Perry stays behind to collect Kelly and Rosetti, which gives them a few minutes to get up the elevators ahead of him. Gerard is in his office with Walsh, thank God, and the others strike up meaningless chatter and a series of unspoken conversations. Royce settles in front of the board without a word.

She catches Renfro at the coffee machine and gets his story out of him. He saw Gerard on Sunday morning, in surprisingly vulnerable shape. Renfro is miraculously unscarred with everything still attached, but he's not any calmer, which is worse.

“Did you get anything out of him?” She already knows the answer when Renfro shakes his head. “It’s bad, isn’t it?” Renfro’s stillness tells her what she needs to know. “Has it gotten this bad before?”

The coffee machine gurgles, and Renfro slaps the side of it. Hill’s tempted to do the same. “You’re giving us too much credit.” He glares at the coffee machine, shakes his head. “Sam doesn’t tell us things. We just have to know when to pay attention.” He holds out a Styrofoam cup with a look on his face like he’s holding out a photo of a mangled body. “He doesn’t normally show this much, though. When he gets like this.”

“Okay,” she says. Even though they both know it’s not.

They settle into their seats when Perry arrives with Kelly and Rosetti, and after a moment, Gerard emerges from his office.

He looks hollow and somehow worse than Royce, and he pushes a box of doughnuts into the middle of the FBI agents without comment. Hill glances inside and is surprised to find each of their favorite doughnuts are represented. She has no goddamn clue how Gerard could have possibly known that, if only because she's not sure if even Royce knows that, but then again, Gerard seems to be a man full of surprises.

All of them eye Gerard and Royce in turn, trying not to be obvious. Waiting for the fireworks, ready to intervene if they seem like they’re finally going to kill each other.

As it turns out, though, they don't need to do anything.

Gerard is surprisingly sedate. Quiet. Polite, even. Well, polite for Gerard, at least. Hill has to suppress a snicker as she watches Gerard coolly dress down Kelly and Rosetti for the clusterfuck at the Hilton. She barely keeps in a shocked hysterical laugh when Gerard actually compliments Royce’s handiwork, as if he wasn’t going to shoot Royce in the face on Saturday for said handiwork. Biggs isn’t as successful, and gets a swift elbow for his trouble.

He’s extending an olive branch. Sam Gerard is extending an olive branch. She didn’t think he even knew that species of tree existed. In fact, the whole day is blessedly devoid of stray cruelty. It’s at least in part because Gerard and Royce won’t even look at each other, don’t exchange two words the entire day even via other people.

It’s not sustainable, Hill knows, and it only works for the day because the rest of them are so relieved that they’re pandering to Gerard and Royce’s peacekeeping-via-total-avoidance. They won’t be able to avoid each other much longer, not when Haslett and Walsh are on the phone agreeing to sew them into each other’s pockets for the foreseeable future. Eventually, something will have to give, and she’s not sure if that means they’ll get along again or...what. She doesn’t let herself think about the or what, knows by their faces that no one else is either.

They agree, through whispered conversations in the break room and coffee line like a bunch of thieves, that they have to be careful, that they have to make sure what happens next isn’t even worse than the Hilton.

Still, when Gerard catches Perry and offers to buy them a round in thanks for the catastrophe of a long weekend, Hill hopes that means that somehow, against all logic and reason, this bizarre thing with Gerard and Royce will work out okay.

The next day, Royce appears bearing coffee and bagels for all of them and a look like he thinks they might want to shoot him, which. He’s not wrong. “So…I’ve been a bit of an asshole,” he says, holding out his peace offering as a shield.

“A bit?” Wang replies, but he’s still reaching for his coffee, so Hill already knows how this will end.

Royce winces and sighs. “Right. Yeah. More than a bit. So…yeah. I’m sorry.”

Even Burkhardt snorts. “Anyone ever tell you you’re terrible at apologizing?”

“Often,” Royce replies. He looks like someone’s just kicked his dog, though, and it’s pathetic enough that Hill takes pity on him.

“First rule of apologizing,” she says, snatching one of the coffees and shoving it in Burkhardt’s face, “apologize after giving him coffee. The world looks more like sunshine and daisies to him when he’s giving you the grateful puppy eyes.”

“It’s how his girlfriend gets him to agree to things in the morning,” Wang says cheerfully, which is how Hill knows Royce has already been forgiven.

“No,” she replies, ignoring Burkhardt’s protests in the background, “his girlfriend gets him to do things because she’s a veterinarian and is trained to work with hopeless fluffballs.”

“I don’t want to know,” Perry calls as he sails through the door.

“I am sorry, you know,” Royce murmurs to her, at a pause in the meeting. “For what happened at the Hilton. For being a jackass.”

“I’m used to you being a jackass,” she replies, not looking up from her notes.

“I know. But for what it’s worth, I didn’t mean what I said. About us not being a team.” That gets her to look up, and Christ, Royce’s face is more open than she’s ever seen. “I want us to be a team. If you’ll have me.”

Hill gives him a flat look and punches him lightly on the arm. “What do you think we’ve been trying to do for months, jackass?”

Of course, this doesn’t resolve the Gerard thing. So they watch. They wait. And over the next few days, it becomes apparent that something once more has changed. None of them knows what changed, but something changed. Gerard and Royce are amicable with each other for days, and when Gerard buys them all a round, they’re back to their usual verbal sparring. Hill’s not sure if it’s gentler now than it was before or if she’s finally paying attention enough to notice they’re not actually arguing, but she’d like to think it’s because they finally got it together.

Either way, the dark cloud over Royce is gone, and he’s back to himself again. The difference is that now, he’s actually interested in becoming friends.

He’s not any less of a shit, of course, and he remains stubbornly private. Now, though, he takes up Burkhardt on his offer to join him and a bunch of other agents watch the Packers get annihilated every once in a while in Burkhardt’s living room, and gets beers with Wang now and then, joins Hill on her loop around the office sometimes, lets Perry drag him with the rest of them for pizza after an especially long day. He joins office gossip at the coffee machine sometimes, and being the worst shit, will embellish on the ones about his own team and let them know so they can have their fun playing into it. He lets a few bits and pieces slip here and there, casually. He recounts catching up with Annie, complete with gore stories. He mentions that he has an engineer brother running the family business, though they’re not close and have been out of touch for a while. He tells a few stray stories about him and Annie’s exploits at NYU, which only confirm that Royce has always been the worst shit.

It’s not much, but it’s miles more than they had before, and it feels like Royce has finally decided to let them keep him. Of course, he still bows out on irregular Fridays with graceful mention of prior plans, and a few of those graceful mentions happen early enough for other people to be there and gossip about it, which Royce, being the worst shit, plays into with glee, in front of his team, just to see how fast he can break their straight faces.

This doesn’t prevent Burkhardt and Wang from fishing to see what Royce actually does with his Fridays, if he’s seeing anyone. Royce gives them a masterful sidestep every time, and when he goes to refresh his coffee, Hill tells them to stop being stupid. Of course, because nothing Hill says has ever been enough to stop them, Burkhardt and Wang take it upon themselves one Friday to try to set up Royce with one of the other agents.

Royce’s sidestep is still masterful, but it is less graceful. Hill arrives at the tail end of it, just soon enough to save Royce by asking what the hell’s going on with a Gambino boss’s bugs. Royce hides near her desk the rest of the day, and by evening Hill decides she’s going to kill Burkhardt and Wang.

They’re leaving at the same time, chatting on their way out the elevator, and who should be there walking up to them but Annie Eastman, in a leather jacket and deep red lipstick instead of her scrubs, her red hair in loose waves around her face. Hill’s brain doesn’t have enough time to short-circuit, though, because Royce steps in front of her with an unmistakably sheepish expression. “So.”

“So?” Hill suddenly remembers that Royce brought her Earl Grey earlier in the night, which he only brings her when he’s trying to butter her up, and despite a run through Royce’s recent escapades, she can’t find anything that would demand him buttering her up for forgiveness.

“So I may have been a bit scatterbrained.”

“...okay?”

“And my good, good, _dear_ _friend_ ,” he says pointedly as Annie strolls up to them and Hill’s brain definitely misfires because Annie looks fantastic in that lipstick, “might be hounding my ass about it. Which is why she’s here now.”

Hill looks between Royce and Annie. She really shouldn’t, in the interest of forming something more intelligent than, “…okay?”

“And my good, good, dear friend of mine,” he soldiers on, ignoring the bemused eyebrow Annie raises at him, “is the actual worst and wanted me to do something for her.”

“...sure?”

“So, see, my friend, Annie,” it would be hilarious seeing Royce try to scrabble for purchase if Hill knew where the fuck this was going, “has been asking me about you. Because she thinks the fact that you saved my ass on multiple occasions makes you a great person, which it does, and she’d like to get to know you. Sometime. After work. Because she’d like to get to know you.”

There’s a sound of a palm hitting a forehead, followed by Annie muttering, “Jesus fuck, John. Shut up and go away now.”

“Gladly.” Hill looks up to see Royce, the jackass, is smirking. Then Royce is backing up to turn on his heel and head toward the parking garage, calling over his shoulder, “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do!”

“Moron,” Annie shouts after him.

“You’re welcome,” he sings back, laughing when Annie flips him off.

Then Annie straightens, turns back to Hill, and smiles because nothing in Hill’s life is fair. “Hi, Hannah. I’m Annie. What my dipshit friend was trying to say is that I’m a hopeless lesbian and if that’s relevant information to you, I would very much like to buy you a drink.”

If Hill had spare brainpower right now, she would probably be able to process this. But she doesn’t, because Annie Eastman is standing in front of her in date night lipstick saying she’s a lesbian and would very much like to buy her a drink.

“So?”Annie is still smiling at her, which is _not fair dammit_ , how is she supposed to make words now? “What do you say?”

“Yes!” Hill blurts, then straightens and shakes her hair into order. “Yes.”

“Yes?” Annie’s grin is blinding and Hill doesn’t dare blink in case she wakes up.

“Yes.” Then Hill reassesses date night lipstick and processes it properly. “Now?”

“If you’re free.”

“Yeah,” Hill says, thanking Mary, Jesus, Joseph and the camel that she happened to pick the navy blouse and her sunburst necklace this morning. “I’m definitely free now.” 

They get a drink. Which somehow turns into another drink and a movie on a different night. And dinner on a third night.

And eventually, a fourth date that winds up in Annie’s apartment, with red wine and Annie dying laughing when Hannah tells her that she thought Annie and Royce were a couple. Doubled over, out of breath, red in the face, dying laughing. “Oh _God_ , no,” Annie gasps, when she can form words five minutes later, “he’s not my type and I’m not his.”

Hannah already knew the first half, but the second half sets her mind to casting a fishing reel. “What do you mean?”

That gets Annie to stop laughing, reaching for her wine glass on the coffee table and taking a long drink while giving Hannah an assessing stare. “To be clear, I’m only telling you this because I already know,” she gestures between them, “that you won’t be an asshole about it.”

Which, fair. Even though the assessing stare Annie gave suggests that she knows Hannah is fishing, and also that she would murder Hannah with a fishing hook if she were an asshole about it. “You know Royce is gay?”

Annie looks like she’s just said the sun rises in the east. “I’ve known John since I was two. Of course I know. It just took him until he was twenty to work up the balls to actually tell me.”

Which is completely in character for everything Hannah knows about John Royce. Of course, that doesn’t resolve the cluster of nerves that’s been lurking in the back of Hannah’s head for a few weeks, so she resolves to fish a little longer. “Mostly for my own edification, what is his type?”

“I have a suspicion he’s head over heels for someone at work,” Annie says, in a coy tone that floods Hannah with relief.

“You know about Sam Gerard?”

Annie stares at her for a solid minute, then exhales, “Oh thank _fuck_. I had no idea how I was going to tiptoe around that.”

“Me either.” Hannah lets herself sink back into the couch, relieved that she doesn’t need to protect Royce’s secrets from his oldest friend. “They finally got their shit together, right?”

“Yeah,” Annie says, “maybe two months ago now?”

“Oh thank _fuck_.” At Annie’s raised brows, Hannah adds, “We had to deal with them at each other’s throats for weeks. It was terrifying.”

“Poor baby,” Annie coos, which, not nearly sympathetic enough.

“We had to deal with _Royce and Gerard_. At each other’s throats. For the purpose of tearing them out. For weeks. _Weeks_ , Annie. We all feared for our lives. And Royce’s life.”

“I can top that.”

“Did you miss the part where we thought they were both going to go to prison for murder?”

“I had to listen to John pining,” Annie replies. “Since _November_.”

…goddammit. “Fine. That wins.”

“Glad we agree. Now,” Annie says, setting her wine glass back on the coffee table, “I’m pretty sure we have more important things to do than talk about my best friend’s terrible taste in men.”

Which they do.

That doesn’t stop Hill from worrying about Royce’s terrible taste in men, even though a) it’s weird to think of it that way and b) Royce’s terrible taste in men somehow seems to be working out for him and c) this is further evidence of Royce’s supernatural capacity to get himself into a heap of shit wearing the wrong shoes and somehow have it turn out in his favor. Which Hill can’t give him shit for, because Annie concurs that doing so before Royce admits it of his own accord would leave him spooked and possibly scare Gerard too, who they both agree is even more spooked and gun-shy about it than Royce. Even though Hill wishes she could tell Royce to stop being a goddamn idiot about it, that he’s got all of them in his corner, even Perry who pretends he doesn’t know anything about anything for the purposes of plausible deniability when it comes time to defend someone’s honor.

“He already knows I’m a lesbian,” Hannah says, one night over pizza.

“No, _I_ hoped you might be,” Annie replies, around a bite. “I just convinced him to create conditions where I might confirm the hope.”

“He already knows we’ve been dating,” which would be thrilling to admit, under any other circumstances.

“Sure he does,” Annie says, as though it’s irrelevant. “In theory, anyway.”

“What do you mean, in theory? He’s your best friend.”

“I mean he’s an idiot who’s good at compartmentalizing when he wants to be. Hannah who I go on dates with and Hill who he sees at work are two completely different people, and it’s not his business to reconcile them because it’s not his business to know that about you.”

That would explain why Royce has carried on at work as he has before, as though he doesn’t know that Hill is sometimes responsible for Annie being unavailable, as if he doesn’t know anything more about her than he did before Annie showed up in a leather jacket and date night lipstick. “Okay, so he’s deliberately dense. Either way, I’m certainly not in any position to judge.”

“He’s not thinking like that,” Annie tells her, with the sound of an argument she’s had far too many times with Royce.

“That’s ridiculous.”

“John’s default setting is ridiculous. And you and I both know fear is irrational.” Annie’s face is drawn, and Hannah has the feeling she’s had the same argument in circles almost too many times for her own sense of safety. “He’s afraid of the fallout, and Sam avoided him for months for that reason. He’s assuming I haven’t told you anything, which I wouldn’t have if you didn’t already know, which means you don’t know anything, by the way. In John’s mind, the best-case scenario is that you wouldn’t mind but have even less seniority than he does, so trying to help him would just get you fired too, and he would never put you in that position. And he’s assuming he’ll get the worst-case scenario, which is he or Sam or both of them lose everything if anyone ever found out.”

Hannah blinks, suddenly afraid to breathe in the fear she can feel from Royce even though she knows he’s miles away. “Why is he assuming that? Perry doesn’t get it, sure, but he’d never fire him for it, and he certainly wouldn’t stand for anyone giving Royce shit. None of us would.” Because the world is awful and unsafe and unfair and Hannah knows that all too well, but not all of it, not with good people in your corner. They’re not safe in the world, but they can be safe in their little bubble of it, at least, and Royce deserves to know that.

“Because the last person before Sam was Daniel Ward, and that ended with a colleague murdering Daniel after threatening blackmail. And Sam is eighteen years older than John is and spent his entire life hiding to protect himself.” Annie shakes her head, reflecting back the sadness welling up in Hannah’s bones. “Just trust me. They won’t feel safe about it until they feel like it’s okay to mention it on their own.”

Hannah doesn’t ask when that might be. She knows Annie doesn’t know the answer, and the weight of that coalesces into a lead lump in her throat.

Of course, she can’t tell Burkhardt and Wang that, because it was never her business to know in the first place. So after the third time they try to set Royce up, she drags them into the copy room on the pretense of making copies she does actually need in order to ask them why they’re being utter morons, straightening papers on the copier with a loud thud.

“What do you mean?” Wang says, sounding entirely too coy for his own health while reaching for a scrap sheet caught in her papers. She snatches it, crumples it, and throws it at his head.

“Trying to set him up.” She glares at Burkhardt, who at least has the decency to look marginally chastised. Hill glances out the door to make sure no one can hear them, then hisses, “You know he doesn’t want to be set up and you know why.”

“It was Burkhardt’s idea,” Wang says, retreating back to the coffee machine. Coward.

“It was just as much your idea,” Burkhardt protests, glaring at Wang.

“What was the idea?” Hill says, because she doesn’t honestly care whose idea it was.

“You know Royce. He’s cagey. He won’t admit anything if you just outright ask him. So _we_ ,” another glare at Wang, “thought we might encourage him to own up before we’re all old and gray.”

“By setting him up?”

“Well, no,” Wang says, “because we know he’ll say no. So we thought we just kind of…you know.”

“Encourage him,” Burkhardt adds.

“By trying to set him up.”

“Because a lot of the agents do it to each other anyway, so doing it to Royce is like a sign of affection.”

“That he’s ours.”

“Right. Even though we know he’ll say no.”

“So either he keeps giving us excuses until he can’t, and then we can get him to admit it,” Wang says, sounding proud of himself.

“Or he’ll just give in and admit it to make us leave him alone,” Burkhardt finishes.

“Either way, he knows we’re showing him a sign of affection, since we would do it to anyone else. So he knows he’s ours.”

“And we get to watch the show one way or another until he works out his shit and he’ll actually listen when we say we’re okay with it.”

“So let me get this straight,” Hill sighs, looking between them and wishing they kept alcohol in the copy room, “your plan was to get free lunch theater until you annoy Royce into admitting he won’t get dinner with anyone at the office because a Deputy Marshal would murder them if they encroached and then murder you for suggesting it?”

“Basically,” Wang says cheerfully.

“That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.” She’s also spent way too much time around them, because it’s also hilarious. Goddamn them. Then again, it is a good cover for Royce, and knowing Royce… “Who was next on your list?”

“Helen from records.”

“Seriously?”

“What?”

“It’s Helen from records. No. Try Alice in violent crime. That’ll get her to leave him alone.”

“You’re a genius and I love you,” Wang says, springing upright to trot to the door. “If we go now we can catch him before he heads home. Want in?”

Hill rolls her eyes. “Go have your fun. I’m meeting Annie after work.”

Wang ducks out, but Burkhardt looks thoughtful. Hill considers the merits of braining him. “Wait, are you and Annie…?”

“You’re supposed to be an investigator, Burkhardt. This isn’t D.B. Cooper. Investigate.”

“Yes, then?”

“Yes.”

“So we _do_ have a weird fixation on redheads,” Burkhardt says, grinning even as he dodges the wad of paper Hill throws at him. “Except Royce, that is.”

“ _Leave, Burkhardt_.”

Even with Burkhardt and Wang playing Russian roulette with their own lives, they’re in the Marshals’ business so much that they get to see the subtle effects of Royce and Gerard. And it is subtle, but even so, for those first two months even Burkhardt and Perry can tell that Gerard is happier.

Sam Gerard.

 _Happy_.

As happy as Sam Gerard ever seems to be, anyway.

Of course, it doesn’t last, because they’re all in each other’s business because of the Gambino trials. Worse, they’re _always_ in each other’s business because of the Gambino trials, and Kelly and Rosetti are there too, in truly fine form.

Hill has just enough time to recognize the pockets of Gerard being happy before they get eclipsed by Gerard’s steadily rising fear. Which isn’t an emotion Hill would have previously thought him capable of, an emotion she only recognizes because it’s the same wounded animal feeling that he let off before Judge O’Connor, now that she knows to look for it under his usual resting state of ashholery. And it somehow hurts worse this time, because this time, it’s not eclipsing Gerard’s resting state of assholery. This time, it’s eclipsing those rare moments where he does seem to be truly comfortable with himself and with Royce, as if he’s taking a deep breath for the first time in years and he’s dizzy with it.

Hill desperately wants to sit Royce down and hug him as she did after his friend killed himself, to let him know it’s alright, that he and Gerard are alright, especially as she begins to see signs of Gerard’s paranoia bleeding into Royce, confirmed by Annie’s increasing worry. But she can’t do that, both because it could shatter Royce and Gerard’s fragile sense of safety and because it’s increasingly unsafe for her to try, not when they’re spending so much time inundated with other people, when any moment alone could be interrupted and usually is and the questions, too, could send Royce and Gerard off balance.

It’s only made worse by the fact that Kelly and Rosetti seem to have a personal vendetta against Royce and Gerard and go out of their way to make Royce’s life hell. So she agrees, with Burkhardt and Wang, to try to shield Royce from it as much as they can even as Perry has to put pressure on CPD to get it together. Gerard’s team, for their part, aren’t tiptoeing any less, but they also don’t seem to be doing anything to try to coax Gerard either.

“Why isn’t this making you crazy?” she finally asks Poole one afternoon at the coffee machine, after seeing a diverted argument about Gerard getting shot, occurring within earshot of Gerard’s team, Royce’s team, and CPD, which clearly left Gerard wanting to crawl out of his skin.

“What makes you think it isn’t?” Poole turns from where she was scaring the coffee machine to stop death-rattling and start making coffee, fixing the same steady look on Hill.

“Because you’re not _doing_ anything,” Hill snaps.

“And what do you suggest we do?” Poole asks coolly. “Sam’s not Royce. You can’t get him to do a damn thing if he doesn’t want to, and you certainly can’t change his mind without hard evidence.”

“That’s what I’m saying. Give him hard evidence.”

“Sam won’t let himself get in a situation with the right kind of hard evidence for this,” Poole replies. “And if we try to push the situation on him, he’ll lock us out completely, and then we won’t know enough to help him when he really does need us.” She spares a look at where Kelly and Rosetti are still at the board, talking on the phone with New York. “All we can do for now is try to cushion them until this is over.”

The problem, of course, is that none of them know when this will be over. Not with the Gambino trials just starting to pick up speed and new cases are appearing like toxic mold. All they can do is watch, and wait, and hope that Kelly and Rosetti’s meaner instincts and basic investigative skills don’t wear out the wall of paranoia that’s keeping Gerard and Royce upright.

But their best efforts don’t cancel out Kelly and Rosetti’s lack of cooperation. They’re just mean enough to be constantly infuriating, just smart enough not to get caught, and just petty enough to take every available opportunity to fuck Royce over, simply because he’s an easier target and there’s nothing Perry can do about it as long as they’re not too obvious. It’s frustrating, but it’s just parrying. They’re waiting for something, an opportunity to properly stick it to Royce and Gerard, so Hill keeps her ears religiously to the ground, listening for any murmur that Kelly and Rosetti might have made their move.

So when she hears Wang’s outraged screech and looks at the TV to see Kelly and Rosetti are holding a news conference after Perry threatened them within an inch of their lives against it, she’s just as furious as the rest of them, but she’s really not surprised.

Gerard is in fine form for a fight and Royce falls in step as soon as they set foot in the precinct, which is the only reason Hill feels alright letting them go to where Kelly and Rosetti await. They’ll be fine.

The records idiot in front of them, however, is another story.

“What do you mean you can’t do the transfer?

“I mean I can’t do the transfer, Agent Hill,” the records idiot replies, with a special kind of snooty superiority reserved for petty fools relying on protocol to stand in the way of people telling them what to do.

“Why?”

“Because I would need approval for that.”

“Special Agent Perry has already approved this.” 

“From _my captain_ , Agent.”

“We just told you that Deputy Gerard is getting the captain’s approval right now.”

“Good for Deputy Gerard,” he replies, with the confidence of someone who has never met Deputy Gerard. “But I would need to see both Captain Roberts’ signature and Special Agent Perry’s approval for that. And then Deputy Gerard would have to sign accepting custody.”

“I just told you that Deputy Gerard has Special Agent Perry’s transfer request with him, because he’s getting the captain’s signature right now. At which point he will come down here and raise unholy hell because you don’t have a form for him to sign.”

“I’m sorry, Agent Hill, but there’s nothing I can do.”

Hill sighs through her teeth. “What’s your name?”

The records idiot blinks. “I’m sorry?”

“What. Is. Your. Name?”

“Joey.” He straightens in his chair, like he thinks that request means he’s going to win this. Idiot. “Joey Clark.”

“Okay, Joey. Can I call you Joey? Because I have a feeling we’re going to be good friends. And since we’re now good friends, I’m going to tell you a secret.” She sets her hands on the desk and stares dead at Joey’s face. “In five minutes, Sam Gerard, who is actually your worst nightmare incarnate, is going to show up here. And when you tell him what you just told me, he’s going to skin you alive and turn your hide into the form you should have had done five minutes ago.” Joey looks at her in disbelief, which quickly morphs into fear when he sees she’s not actually joking. “Assuming you survive that experience--because Deputy Gerard is quite good at what he does--I’m going to remember your name and your ID, Joey Clark, because we have multiple witnesses in a major mafia case whose lives may have been put in danger due to a press conference this morning. Do you know why I’m going to remember your name and ID, Joey?” He blinks, and she leans in. “Because you’re the idiot who left them in danger because of a signature you already knew was coming.” She straightens, inspecting Joey Clark’s pasty face with satisfaction. “So get busy, Joey, unless you want their lives on your head.”

“Agent Hill, you see--”

Hill hardens her eyes enough to make him flinch, as if preparing for a throwing stone. “You’re not getting busy. Why?”

“I can’t do the sign over without your ID, ma’am.”

“My ID, actually,” Poole says. Joey turns to her in terror that there’s two of them. “You’re signing them over to Marshals custody.”

She lays her ID between them. Joey looks at Hill in trepidation, as if waiting for a trick.

“Don’t look at her,” Poole says, as if snapping the reins at a horse. “You’ve got custody to transfer. Get busy or I’ll find someone who will.” Hill settles into her chair, content to let Poole take it from there.

Then she gets a proper look at Poole’s ID. "Wait, your name is--"

"If you finish that sentence I will shoot you dead and no one will ever be able to prove it was me," Poole says without looking up from the computer.

She's _everything_ Hill wants to be when she grows up. 

They emerge victorious at the same time Royce, Gerard, and Renfro emerge from the captain’s office with Kelly and Rosetti’s sour faces at their backs. Poole hands over the completed paperwork and says that it was mostly Hill with a subdued pride that warms her to her toes.

Then Gerard grins at her, a real one that breaks through the severe lines of his face, and when he says they’ll make a menace of her yet, she can’t help but beam back.

Gerard is _proud_ of her. He's not her boss, but it inspires something akin to that one afternoon with Perry. Gerard is a good man, at heart, though he hides it well under a default setting of utter bastard. And she thinks, maybe it makes sense. What Royce sees in Gerard.

It takes all day to get the witnesses moved and resettled into a new safe house in Marshal custody, but it’s invigorating still. By the end of the day, Perry calls, tells them all to come back to the Marshals’ office to tie it all off. They’re in high spirits in the car ride back, in sync, a team, and Hill is cracking jokes with Renfro when they step back into the office. It’s not over, not at all, but for today, at least, they have a victory.

Except Perry doesn’t look like they have a victory. Perry looks like he’s just found out one of them is scheduled for lethal injection. And when he brings Gerard and Royce into Walsh’s office, where Hill can see Kelly and Rosetti and an equally grim Walsh waiting for them, her heart stops in her chest. Kelly and Rosetti are making their move.

“Something’s wrong,” she says, in a tone that immediately silences all joking and turns all heads to where she’s looking. When they all look at each other again, they’re uneasy. 

“The witnesses,” Wang says, at which Newman exhales _shit_.

“We already handled the witnesses,” Biggs says.

“They weren’t federal. They’re not Marshal jurisdiction.”

“Yeah, but Perry approved and the captain signed. That means they’re officially our problem, stamped and sealed,” Newman adds, except he doesn’t sound as calm about that as he should.

“Doesn’t matter,” Poole says, and Hill knows they’re in trouble when even _Poole_ sounds worried. “Sam and Royce dropped a brick on their toes, even if it’s Perry’s fault.”

“I don’t think they’re talking about the witnesses,” Renfro murmurs. “Look.”

Through the glass of Walsh’s office, they can see that Gerard has gone frighteningly still.

“They’re not,” Hill says, except it’s more of a sharp exhale, because she can’t take in air the knife in her ribs.

“Are they?” Burkhardt says.

“They can’t be,” Henry says. “Sam’s never even breathed a word to Cosmo. There’s nothing for them to find on Sam.”

“Well clearly they found something,” Renfro snaps.

They all watch as Kelly leans forward and says something with a mean glint in his face. Something that makes Royce immediately go pale.

 _They can’t be_ , Hill thinks, trying to cling to her logic through the terrified hammering of her pulse that says yes they are, that the cruel world has found its way into their little bubble and it’s going to suffocate Royce and Gerard.

“There’s nothing to find,” Biggs says back, but he’s got one hand fisting his hair, like he can pull the answer free. “Sam doesn’t talk to anyone but us. They couldn’t have found anything on him except from us, and Sam never even told Cosmo anything.”

“New York,” Hill breathes, feeling her heart skip and thud. They stare at her blankly. “ _New York_. We gave them the contact information of Royce’s old coworkers in New York. They’ve been on the phone with them for weeks.”

“I thought he came to you on a commendation,” Newman says, frowning, because suddenly they all look suitably afraid.

“He did.” Hill takes a breath, recites to herself that she has to do this, even though she wants to bury it and never look again. “That and a lot of dirty laundry. That’s why he came here after Sheridan.”

“What kind of dirty laundry?” Poole says, except Hill can’t quite breathe, because this isn’t her secret to know and certainly not her secret to share and she hates that she has to say this. “Hill. What kind of dirty laundry?”

“About Royce and one of the agents Sheridan killed.” _I’m sorry, Royce, I’m so sorry._ ”Royce and Daniel Ward.”

“How bad is it?” Poole asks, even though her voice says she already knows.

“Bad enough to get Ward killed and Royce chased out of New York.”

“ _Fuck_ ,” Renfro snarls.

“We need to get in there,” Burkhardt says.

“And do what?” Newman asks, even though his face is already steeled.

“Help them,” Renfro says, and they all rush toward Walsh’s office.

If there was any doubt left in her mind about what's going on in Walsh's office, it's gone as soon as she sees the scene waiting for them, confirmed by Walsh's plea not to turn this into a humiliation, as if Royce and Gerard haven't been humiliated by what Kelly and Rosetti have already said.

"He's asking if your boss and your boy are queer." She feels Poole bristle beside her, seething, and very nearly reaches for her gun to shoot the smug look off that bastard Kelly's face. Poole could take Rosetti, she thinks, by the rage radiating off her, and with the rest of them as backup they might be able to grab Royce and Gerard and run.

Her anger falters, though, when she sees Gerard. He's staring into the room with a deep, hollow despair, like his heart has been ripped out of his chest while he watches his entire life go up in flames in slow motion and all he can do is sit there in the absolute certainty that he's going to burn too, waiting for one of them, one of his _family_ , to light the match. He thinks they're going to hurt him, she knows, and the thought nearly breaks her heart. 

And then there's Royce, white as a sheet and standing just behind Gerard's chair, regarding them all with uncomprehending terror. Worse, he keeps glancing between the rest of them and Gerard like he wants to step in front of him the way he did that night at the Hilton, or reach the hand curling and uncurling in the air at his side to touch Gerard, to remind Gerard that he's still there at his back, to try to soothe him. But Royce can't do either of those things, because both would incriminate them. He can't do anything to help Gerard now without giving himself away.

 _You can't help_ , she thinks, as Haslett explains delicately about allegations of inappropriate conduct. _But we can._ So when Marshal Walsh looks her in the eye and asks her to tell the truth, there's no choice in her mind.


	2. Mrs. Eleanor Rosen

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eleanor Rosen meets her new neighbor, a young Deputy Marshal named Sam Gerard, in 1974. Eighteen years later, in 1992, many things have changed (her husband's death, her retirement, Chicago itself) but not Sam. Sam still brings her baked goods, and Sam, it hurts her heart to see, is still alone. Eleanor does what she can to help Sam's loneliness, delighted when he makes friends with the charming young FBI agent named John Royce who just moved to the neighborhood. John is, after all, a charming young man with a spark in him that's good for Sam, and he can break up Sam's loneliness in ways a little old lady can't (she doesn't realize the extent of that statement, at first). 
> 
> Remember Sam's neighbor, Mrs. Rosen? As it turns out, building an eighteen-year friendship with Sam Gerard over baked goods teaches you a few things--even a few unexpected things.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So the world is ugly and awful and heartbreaking right now, and while this chapter does have its share of heartbreak and heartache, it does come with the promise that there are good people in the world. Consider it my gift to you while we all carry on <3

"Sam Gerard, you've been on the news again!" Eleanor scolds as she pulls open her apartment door. "It worries me, you know." She doesn't mention that she found it funny to watch him walk all over those policemen--it would only encourage him.

But Sam just laughs that deep gravelly chuckle of his and holds aloft a lemon spice loaf, a peace offering. She glares at him and lets him in, calling into the apartment to let James know Sam has come to visit. James rolls out in his wheelchair, letting out a guffaw that does her heart good--he has a soft spot for Sam's lemon spice loaf. Eleanor shakes her head and sets to making tea in the kitchen, listening to James tell Sam about a film he had seen reviews for in the papers.

Sam has been their upstairs neighbor for about four years, a young man plucked straight from Texas. It only fits that he's a Marshal, though she's not quite sure what Chicago has for Sam that Texas didn't. He doesn't seem to have left any family behind, judging by the fact that he never goes back to Texas and no one from Texas comes to see him. James says it's because it's too damn cold in Chicago for anyone from Texas to consider flying north--except, apparently, Sam, who they both know to be deeply stubborn.

He's there for her when James dies later that year, bringing by various breads for her to freeze. She asks him if he wouldn't mind being at the funeral if he can, that James would have liked having him there, and Sam does appear in a somber black suit, as much a comfort as anyone else who comes to pay their respects.

As so marches on a long year in which Eleanor slowly becomes accustomed to being alone. She acquires a young cat by accident and names it Astaire in deference to James, is convinced by her friend Alice to join her weekly bridge club. When she retires, she takes to going on walks every day and volunteers at the local library a few days a week, calling her daughter and grandchildren on Saturdays. There's companionship to be had, even if she misses having James there.

And, of course, there's always Sam, asking how she's doing when he runs into her and stopping by with various baked goods that he seems to bake at all hours of the night, when she's awake and hears him shuffling. It's not that the walls are thin so much as that, unlike many of her friends, her ears have remained quite sharp even as her eyesight dims and her hair goes white. She supposes it would drive someone else up the walls, to hear Sam coming and going at all hours and tinkering in his kitchen at even stranger times of night, but it's a solace to her, to hear Sam above her working through his own insomnia while she lays awake petting her cat. It’s something consistent, from when she had James, and it’s nice to know that Sam is still there, safe from the bad men he pursues in the daylight.

She offers him coffee one morning when he stops by with coffee cake, but he politely declines--a long day at work ahead. She makes it clear the offer stands anytime he happens to be up dreadfully early, either to run as she knows he does most mornings or for any other reason, and sends him off after making him promise to stay safe as she knows he never does. Once her apartment door closes, Eleanor finds a place for the coffee cake in her kitchen and cuts a slice, thinking that James would have liked the cinnamon crumbles on it. Settling at her front window with that thought and her plate, she contemplates the puzzle of Sam Gerard to a sleeping Astaire, and whether Sam has anyone in his life with favorite baked goods that are his business to remember.

Sam's not attractive in the conventional sense, if only because his features shouldn't make sense together. The angles of his face are too sharp, his ears too big, his eyes set deep and seeming even deeper for how dark they are. But it's an intelligent face, handsome in the same way as the Atlantic Ocean--something wild, bracing, merciless. It's not every woman that could stand to be the moon pulling in Sam's tides, or the coastline on which they crash, and Sam is nothing if not a force of nature.

A few weeks later, Sam gives her a devil's food cake, which wins over her entire bridge club when she distributes it. They don't quite believe her when she says it's from her upstairs neighbor, Sam, until he appears on another Sunday with banana bread. The following week, they're setting up the game with the TV still on in the background and who should appear on the news but Sam, giving a press conference. Somehow, this charms her friends even more, and they all giggle when he walks all over a reporter with his bone-dry Texas lilt.

The baking, like many things Sam Gerard, doesn't seem to make sense with the rest of him. She pictures Marshals as a relic of the Wild West, chasing bad men and having shootouts, though Illinois doesn't mesh with the desert in her mind, and she's fairly sure it would be on the news if Marshals regularly had shootouts in Chicago. But then, Sam has a way of remembering recipes she likes and refining the ones she's fond of. He always brings her a warm batch of her favorite molasses cookies for Christmas and always appears with a pecan pie so very like the ones James loved so much on the anniversary of his death, eating a slice with her and giving her a ride to the cemetery to lay flowers when he happens to be around.

Sam Gerard is a good man, and that, she supposes, makes complete sense from a man of the law.

It saddens Eleanor to see Sam remain steadfastly alone for five years, then ten, then fifteen and eighteen comes with little promise that twenty will be any different. There are men who spend their lives on their own, who are made for solitude, and while Sam is well-adjusted to being alone, he's not the type of man who was meant to spend his life that way. He's lonely, she knows, and seems stubbornly disinclined to do anything about it. And it's a horrible shame because he is a good man, if not a happy one, who deserves to be happy for the amount of kindness he affords others despite his gruff exterior.

Her friends suggest setting him up with their daughters or nieces, but Sam either isn't there because of work or demurs on account of work whenever they try. Eleanor never tries, and eventually, her friends give up too. Sam's business is his own, as far as she's concerned, and even if he never does marry, she contents herself with trying to offer him a bit of respite from his loneliness by doing at least half as many kind things for him as he does for her.

She's taking a walk one morning and sees Sam finishing a run, but unlike the many times she's seen Sam in the mornings, he has a companion. A younger, dark-haired man. She's seen a rotating door of regular faces in the last ten years, people who have introduced themselves as Sam's colleagues even though she's seen them around enough and heard them talk about Sam enough over those ten years to suspect they're more like his own children. This man isn't one of them.

She sees them again, and again, concluding that they must run together every morning. They look mismatched--Sam old and stern alongside his much younger companion who has lively eyes and a face prone to easy smiles.

Eventually, she runs into Sam's companion on his own and discovers his name is John Royce. He is delighted to learn she's Sam's neighbor, though he doesn't talk about running with Sam every morning--instead, he mentions that they happen to know each other through work. She holds herself back from mentioning that she's seen them running together before, finding it odd that John would mention work as if he and Sam only happen to run into each other sometimes, as if they don't run together every morning. Still, she supposes, it's none of her business. In any case, John seems like a perfectly charming young man.

She later learns, from her friend Lillian up the street, that John is an FBI agent who moved in a few months ago. That makes sense. Sam is a Deputy Marshal, after all, and he's still on the news now and then, looking like he's been cut from stone and could scare confessions out of lesser men just by staring at them. Eleanor still feels a swell of pride whenever she sees him on TV after all these years, knowing Sam is out there somewhere putting his good heart to good use. It's nice, then, to know that he has another friend he sees often, someone else to break up his loneliness for a while as a little old lady couldn’t.

Eleanor wakes with a start in the dead of night one Saturday to the sound of men's voices above her, shouting. At first, she thinks she dreamed it, but then she hears slamming and Sam's raised voice. Sam, she realizes, is upstairs, arguing with someone. A trill of fear races through her--did one of Sam's fugitives follow him home? Is Sam hurt? There's a loud thump, then another, and she tells herself that if there's any more sounds she'll call the police. But there are no more sounds, and after thirty minutes, she decides against picking up the phone to dial 911.

Eleanor doesn't sleep the rest of the night, though, and gets up early the next morning determined to make sure Sam's alright. But when she opens her apartment door at six, she sees Sam's back, leaving the building in running clothes. His normal running time. She closes the door reluctantly, telling herself that if there was someone dangerous in Sam's apartment, he wouldn't be going on his normal morning run.

It doesn't settle her though, and she jumps when she hears a door pull shut above her, footsteps in the hall. That's Sam's door, but Eleanor's been watching the window to make sure Sam reappears safe and sound, so she knows it's not Sam. After two minutes of debating with herself, she resolves to check, assuring herself it's nothing. But by the time she steps into the hallway, there's no one there, and no one in the street either, not even Sam. Eleanor stays frozen for five minutes, weighing what to do to make sure Sam is safe, the relative likelihood of a fugitive finding Sam in his own home as if this is a scene from a movie.

A car pulls up to shake her out of her reverie, and she's terrified for a moment before she realizes that it's one of Sam's kids stepping out of the car. "Oh, Cosmo!"

"Morning, Mrs. Rosen," he says, walking up to her with a tired smile.

He's trying to seem cheerful, and that worries her even more. "Is everything alright?"

"Hm? Oh, yeah. Long night, is all. Is Sam in?"

Eleanor shakes her head, pointing in the direction Sam went almost an hour ago. "He's off running." She gives Cosmo her best worried old lady look, which isn't even hard now, considering how worried she really is. "Is Sam alright? He's not in any trouble, is he?"

"No, ma'am, no trouble," Cosmo says, his voice deliberately smooth and placating.

"You're not a very good liar, Cosmo."

He blinks, then laughs. "Like I said, long night. You mind letting me in?"

Eleanor pulls open the door and ushers Cosmo inside. If anyone can make sure Sam is safe, it’s one of his kids. "Make sure he's alright, would you? I worry about him."

"You and me both, Mrs. Rosen," Cosmo mutters, though she's not sure he meant to be heard. People often forget she’s not old enough to be deaf. "I'll wait for him upstairs."

"Tell him thank you for the banana bread!" she calls, and hears an answering affirmation. She's not quite sure what Cosmo intends to do when he gets to Sam's door, but she has her answer in the sound of a doorknob turning--apparently, whoever left earlier didn't lock the door on their way out.

Eleanor still returns to her apartment to resume her perch near her front window, relieved when Sam reappears fifteen minutes later. She doesn't know how far Sam ran, but she can guess it's much farther than usual. He's distracted, too, because he doesn't notice Cosmo's car and marches back to his own apartment. After a short period, Cosmo reappears on his way to his car, looking no calmer than he did when he arrived.

About thirty minutes after Cosmo leaves, as Eleanor prepares her breakfast, she hears the telltale signs of Sam puttering in his kitchen. Lo and behold, there’s a knock on her door a little before eleven just after she hangs up with Alice to confirm the arrival of the bridge club around one after the churchgoers among them have made it home, and there’s Sam with a hummingbird cake which does nothing to conceal the gaunt exhaustion carving shadows into his face or the dark cloud lurking just beyond his shoulder. However long of a night Cosmo had, Eleanor suspects Sam’s was longer.

“I hope I’m not interrupting,” Sam says, even though he knows full well that he isn’t, that her bridge club usually appears around one after many years of appearing with baked goods for the same occasion.

“Not at all,” Eleanor replies, opening the door with an eye toward Astaire stretching on the carpet. “Come in, sit.”

“I don’t want to impose,” Sam says, holding out the hummingbird cake, a peace offering for his weak attempt to avoid her. But Eleanor knows he doesn’t have work today or he wouldn’t still be here at eleven a.m. and fixes him with a look that brooks no arguments.

“Get inside and sit before the cat gets out, you can spare some time for a cup of coffee on a Sunday with a little old lady.”

It’s a sign of Sam’s tiredness that he comes inside without protest, handing over the cake to run his fingers along Astaire’s spine when the cat pads over to rub against his shin.

“What have you brought today?” Eleanor asks, even though she already knows, because she also knows that the art of dealing with a recalcitrant Sam is to keep him talking.

“Hummingbird cake,” he replies, dropping into a chair at her kitchen table with a sigh.

“That sounds like you’ve been out running longer than usual today,” she calls from the kitchen, emerging with a mug of black coffee for him and a refill of her own mug.

“It’s my day off.”

“I should hope so, you look exhausted.” A statement further confirmed by the way Sam takes a long drink of his coffee, which he only does when he needs to be gone in a hurry, is truly bone tired, or both.

“I have a lovely neighbor keeps me up at night,” Sam says in a dry tone that always works on Eleanor’s bridge club.

“Flirting will get you nowhere with me,” she replies, because she’s known him much longer than the members of her bridge club. “Is everything alright, Sam?”

Sam sets his coffee down and gives her a smile that, once upon a time, she wouldn’t have recognized as forced. “Of course. Why wouldn’t it be?”

Eleanor briefly considers mentioning the sounds of arguing she heard last night but decides against it. In a mood like this, it’s probably the kind of thing that would make Sam lock up. So she takes the safer route, to try to nudge him into talking as she would coax Astaire into being brushed. “You just seem like you’ve been more tired lately, these last few weeks.”

It speaks to how tired Sam is that his mask slips a little when he sighs. “So people keep telling me.”

“Cosmo?”

Sam hums, not even pretending not to know what she means. “Thanks for letting him in.”

Eleanor knows him well enough to know he’s not all that grateful for it and not to take that personally. She reaches out to pat his hand, hoping he catches on anyway. “I don’t mean to meddle. But I worry about you. We all do.” She sits back in her chair, giving Sam the bit of breathing space he tends to need to absorb outright affection.

Sam gives her a quirk of the lips that she’s come to recognize as an actual Sam Gerard smile, albeit a very tired one. “Thanks, Eleanor.”

She thinks of the arguing, the fight, Cosmo worried on the doorstep this morning after a long night, Sam’s threadbare state in front of her. But she can’t mention those things, she knows, because even worn out as he is now, she knows that Sam would run from her, and that often portends running from people in a better position to knock sense into him. And this, Eleanor suspects, is one of those times that requires delicacy, though she couldn’t for the life of her point to why. “You’re a good man, Sam,” she says gently because she’s had the sense for a while now that Sam is the last person to believe it. “You do a lot of good out there. You deserve good too. That and a good night’s rest and a proper meal,” she says, letting her best old lady scolding tone slip in at the end, to make Sam chuckle, to bring him back to his comfort zone again. “Let me cut you a bit of this cake. With all the spoiling you give us, my bridge club certainly won’t hold a slice against you.”

“No, thanks Eleanor,” Sam shakes his head, standing up from his chair. “I ought to be going. Long week at the office coming.” Eleanor knows a lost cause when she sees one and acquiesces with regret.

“In that case, get some sleep,” she says, standing and walking him to the door. “And the next time you bring me something, Sam Gerard, you’re having a bit of it with me. I meant what I said about a proper meal.”

Sam chuckles again. “You have my word.” And Sam is the kind of man that will keep it, she knows, even if it takes him a while to get there. So Eleanor opens the door and lets Sam escape to the stairs and his own apartment, hoping that he does get sleep and knowing he probably won’t.

And two hours later, when her bridge club starts arriving and cooing in delight over Sam’s gift, she cuts it in the kitchen thinking of Sam, hoping that Cosmo had greater success, or, at the very least, that whoever Sam was arguing with won’t trouble his sleep again anytime soon.

Eleanor doesn't know what changed, but after that weekend, to Eleanor’s surprise, John becomes a fixture in Sam's apartment. Or, rather, he always seems to be coming or going, and Sam often comes or goes with a frequency that she can only assume means he's visiting John's apartment a few blocks away, mostly because he always sets off in that direction and doesn’t take his car. It worries her, at first, because John is an FBI agent and his presence might portend as much danger to Sam as good, if indeed one of Sam’s bad men did find him at his own home. But John never seems to be all that worried when he arrives and isn't always dressed for work, so after a few weeks she decides that he must not be there because Sam needs protecting from anyone.

After about eight months of John coming and going from Sam’s apartment, Eleanor is thoroughly used to him. She says hello when she happens to run into him, though John never appears when Sam comes to visit her and Sam never mentions him. If she didn’t know better, she wouldn’t think anything had changed, except for the fact that Sam is clearly happier, sleeping better than he used to. But then again, she supposes, not everyone wants to spend time with an elderly widow, and she doesn’t really know John that well in any case.

She still sees them running in the mornings, though usually only in passing. It’s nice to know that Sam has a routine to share with his friend, and it becomes part of her ritual to check where in their route they are when she sees them. Eleanor happens to spot them one morning on a street corner, and notices with some surprise that Sam reaches out a hand to John’s back, near his shoulders, redirecting him in a comfortable movement that John seems entirely unsurprised by.

They must be very good friends, she thinks. It makes sense, given how often John comes and goes from Sam's apartment, though she can't recall ever seeing Sam touch his other friends or his kids. But then again, she supposes, she can’t remember seeing Sam’s other friends or his kids come and go with as much frequency as John does, so perhaps that particular sign of affection is reserved for Sam’s very good friends.

A few weeks later, Eleanor opens the door to her apartment late at night, as quiet as she can be. It’s terribly late, and she can’t sleep. She only just remembered, with some embarrassment, the mailbox she neglected earlier in the day, and figured it might do her some good to stretch her legs.

She starts when she sees movement at the far end of the hall, but settles down when she sees it’s just Sam and John walking toward the stairwell. Just off work, by the look of them, and dead tired to boot. It’s dim in the hall, and they haven’t noticed her, talking quietly as they are. Eleanor takes a breath to say hello, but it freezes in her throat when Sam’s hand catches the side of John’s face, tilting John toward him so Sam can kiss him and John can kiss back.

It’s brief, and then John grumbles something Sam quietly chortles at, and then they vanish into the stairwell. Eleanor slips back into her own apartment and closes the door silently, the mail forgotten once more.

Sam and John. John and Sam. Sam kissing John and John kissing Sam back, as a couple would.

Eleanor has to sit on that thought for a while. A good long while. Turns it over, takes its shape and weight, explains it to a disinterested Astaire.

She wishes James were here, to balance out her own reaction. James could be emotionally dense, yes, but there were also times when he could cut straight to the root of the matter as though none of the rest was important.

It’s that thought that catches Eleanor, lets her settle with the idea of Sam and John, John and Sam. Because Sam is a Deputy Marshal, and John is an FBI agent. They’ve committed their lives to serving others. Compared to that, compared to all the good she knows Sam has done in eighteen years of knowing him, none of the rest is important at all.

And while she certainly doesn't understand it, well. Sam Gerard is a good man who spends his days protecting people. And given how much happier he's been since John started frequenting his life, she supposes she can't hold it against him if he finds his happiness in unexpected places. If anyone deserves to be happy, especially after so many years of being alone, it’s Sam.

The next time Eleanor sees Sam, she asks after John. She carries on as if she hasn't noticed Sam freeze in place, saying she's seen John around and it's been good to see he and Sam have hit it off.

He unclenches only a little, says John is doing well.

"Well,” Eleanor says, patting his elbow as though she hasn’t noticed a single thing wrong, “have him come with you, next time you come to say hello, would you? I've seen him come and go so much it's a shame not to see you both at once."

Sam is still stiff when he leaves, but Eleanor does her best to carry on as cheerfully as ever. She’s spent enough time around Sam to know he’ll come around eventually, so long as she keeps coaxing him with the reassurance that it’s perfectly fine to do so.

To Eleanor's surprise, she opens her door to find John there not a week later.

"Oh, John! Is Sam not with you?"

"No, no," John says, rubbing the back of his neck. He's not entirely sure he ought to be at her doorstep, she knows, though it's to his credit that he's there anyway. "He's sick."

Ah, yes. It happens from time to time, that a cold uncowed by the wrath of Sam Gerard manages to slip past him. She's gone up to his apartment to make him chicken soup on those occasions and every time has found him to be an absolute nightmare of a patient, thoroughly offended that a disease had the nerve to infect him. Eleanor draws on her years as a nurse and scolds him every time to take better care of himself, setting him on the couch while she makes tea and gets soup going on his stove.

John looks at her, nervous and now, she can see, more than a bit sheepish. "I, um. I was going to try to make something, but I need Sam's pie pan. I think you have it?"

"Oh, yes, of course. Let me get it for you," Eleanor bustles back into her apartment, ushering John in after her to keep Astaire from trying to get out. "You know, I usually come up and make chicken soup in his apartment for him when he's sick. I can't carry the soup pot up the stairs, but he has one of his own. I can do that for you, if it's not any imposition--I know Sam is an awful patient."

"It's almost as if you know him," John mutters, then grins as he takes the pie pan. "I'm sure he'd like that."

She takes ingredients from her fridge, leaving behind some that John says Sam already has, and he helps her haul them up the stairs.

They're setting things down in the kitchen when Sam shuffles in, clad in a thick sweater and plainly miserable. "Morning, Sam," Eleanor says, pulling the wrapping off a chicken as if she can't see Sam's befuddled look, as if Sam isn’t looking at her with no small degree of suspicion. "John tells me you're sick."

The befuddled look turns into a flat glare in John's direction. "And why did he tell you that?"

"Because I needed a pie pan, and someone loaned theirs out to the neighbor last week," John replies, brandishing the pan as if he means to spook Sam into submission with it.

Sam is unimpressed. "What the hell do you need my pie pan for?"

"Something my mother used to do when I was sick. Chicken pot pie."

"You don't know how to bake."

"I can figure it out."

Sam raises an eyebrow, his stony expression ruined when he sneezes.

They're bickering, Eleanor realizes, and it's so domestic she has to stifle a laugh even as it warms her heart that Sam has someone to be domestic with. After a moment, Sam sighs. "Do you at least have a recipe?"

"First of all, I resent that. Second of all, yes, you jackass. It's my mother's."

"Do you know what to do with it?"

"I'll figure it out."

"Before or after you light my kitchen on fire?"

Eleanor cuts in to rescue John before she starts properly laughing and embarrasses both of them. "I used to make pot pie. If you've got the recipe I can fill in the gaps."

John grins at Sam, completely undeterred by the long-suffering stare he gets in return. "See? Problem solving. Now go back to the living room, you look like you're going to fall over."

Sam does look rather pale, and now that Eleanor looks properly, he's leaning against the door frame. "Go sit, dear. I'll bring you tea." Sam mutters something about there being two of them now but goes.

When she brings him tea fifteen minutes later, she finds him curled on the couch awake out of sheer stubbornness. She drapes a blanket over him and orders him to get some rest, pretending not to hear John chuckling in the kitchen.

It's readily apparent that John doesn't know the first thing about baking, though his mother's recipe is a rather good one. Eleanor guides him through making the dough while she separates the chicken, pausing occasionally to help him make sense of what’s in front of him. It turns out surprisingly well, considering John's impressive lack of technique. Eleanor nods in approval, which clearly pleases him. "You'll have to let your mother know how it turns out," she says, returning to the chicken bones and dropping the meat into Sam’s soup pot.

"My parents passed away almost nine years ago now," John replies, not looking up.

"Ah. I'm sorry.” John doesn’t seem bothered, so she carries on. “In any case, I'm sure she would be proud to see you taking care of Sam like this."

"Thanks, Eleanor."

She pauses a moment, then asks casually, “Would she have liked Sam? Your mother?”

John hums, setting himself to the filling. “She seemed to think I had good taste in friends.”

“And...boyfriends?”

Eleanor has to stop herself from laughing when she sees John's deer-in-the-headlights expression because she can tell he’s genuinely worried, poor thing. Still, she does let a bit of scolding slip in when she gives him an unimpressed look and says, "I'm old, dear, not stupid."

She turns to her soup pot, giving it a good stir to keep the chicken from scalding. "Sam's a good man," she says, brandishing her soup ladle as she turns to look at John, "and he deserves to be treated well. You remember that, John Royce.”

John looks like she's just clubbed him over the head, but he recovers quickly. “That he is, Eleanor.” She looks him up and down, nods, and returns to her soup pot.

The pot pie makes its way to the oven, and Eleanor sets to chopping vegetables. John ducks into the living room to check on Sam, where Eleanor can’t help but hear them bickering quietly again. She hears her own name mentioned, followed by reassuring tones from John.

“Your neighbor is something, you know,” John murmurs.

Eleanor can hear Sam’s fond smile in his voice. “Isn’t she just?”

She returns to her soup, pleased. Sam won’t be lonely with his John there to look after him, and she has soup to finish for the both of them.


	3. Dr. Annie Eastman

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Annie Eastman is the only reason John Royce survived his twenty-first birthday. Which would make it a shame if she killed his stupid pining ass now. Or the asshole for whom he’s pining, because Sam has a talent for leaving shards of John in his wake.
> 
> Or: Annie Eastman is the real MVP. Also, she’s the only reason Sam and John ever got their shit together (with the help of a death threat or two). Come for the idiots in love, stay for the useless lesbians (also in love).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...I'd say something, but I feel like Annie can speak for herself. For almost as long as the original fic. 
> 
> Or: the one where we finally see how John kept his shit together the whole time.

It’s half past midnight on a Thursday when Annie decides she’s going to murder Sam Gerard. It’s a good thing she’s an ER doctor because otherwise, she’d never be able to get away with it.

Sam is, to hear John’s description, a first-class piece of work, a force of nature whose default setting is sonofabitch. He’s about eighteen years older and five grade levels senior to John, roughly the Marshals Service equivalent of John’s boss’s boss, and is clearly accustomed to getting his way by virtue of being both frightening and frighteningly good at his job. He also has a firm distaste for FBI agents, a deep dislike for local cops, and an abiding hatred for morons, taking entirely too much pleasure in terrorizing the hapless idiots with the misfortune of standing in his way.

He is, in short, a complete nightmare and almost completely unattainable. Exactly John’s type, then.

It’s almost worse that John got explicit verbal confirmation that Sam is gay within two days of meeting him. That makes Sam only almost completely unattainable, instead of completely unattainable. Without that knowledge, the statistical probability of Sam being straight combined with the risk of pursuing a proven rat bastard with the significant potential to fuck up his career out of spite would leave John content to just bicker with Sam and let his attraction flicker out of its own accord, or get stomped out as a natural consequence of Sam being an asshole.

But he does have that confirmation. Which is why Annie is probably going to murder Sam Gerard, if only for her own peace of mind.

And yet, she keeps inviting John to her apartment. Because he is still her best friend, but mostly on account of sleep deprivation.

“Doctor order something?” John calls from the other side of her door.

“I don’t know,” she calls from the couch, even though she’s already walking to the door. “What do you have?”

“Ice cream.”

“Cherry garcia or I’m not letting you in.”

“Good thing I brought caramel then.” It’s a sign that John is naturally incorrigible that he can still manage it when she’s dead tired. Annie still lets him in and smacks him for his trouble, rolling her eyes at his cry of pain. “Aren’t doctors supposed to do no harm?”

“You’re not my patient.”

“I could arrest you for assaulting a federal agent.”

“Hand over the damn carton, Royce, or you’ll find out what assaulting a federal agent actually means.” It is cherry garcia, because John only pretends to be a shit. Mostly. Fifty-two percent of the time.

“Tell Auntie your troubles,” John purrs in his worst nasally queen voice, grinning at her answering glare as he plops on her couch after her and loosens his tie with a sigh of relief.

“I’m going to kill that smug bastard Barker,” she grouses, tossing John a spoon.

“Plausible deniability,” he sings back.

“Yeah, yeah.”

“What did he do now?”

“Told me off in front of the other residents for changing his orders and taking a kid down to the OR for surgery. Never mind that if I hadn’t _actually_ looked at the damn film and sent him to the OR, the kid would’ve been dead by the end of the night.”

John just laughs. “Having known you all my life, I can safely say they’ll figure out you’re smarter than all of them.”

“After how many near misses?”

“You’re a good doctor, Annie,” John says gently, “but it’s not your job to save everyone.”

“I can damn well try.”

“You can’t be everywhere at once.” John holds out the ice cream. “Take the victories when you’ve got them, doc. You saved a boy’s life. That matters.”

“Yeah.” Annie takes a spoonful and lets the ice cream melt in her mouth. If victory tastes like cherry garcia, she’ll take it. “How’s saving the world at your end?”

“If by saving the world you mean drowning in paperwork, fantastic.”

She’s never understood how John feels at home watching bad men do terrible things in the middle of organized crime stings, but then, he’s never understood why she feels in her element running in fifteen directions in an emergency room. “More Gambino stuff?”

“I’m starting to think Chicago doesn’t have anything else,” John sighs. “Hill spotted something we missed before with a suspect, so hopefully that turns into something. Sam thinks one of our witnesses is hiding something, which would support Hill’s theory.”

He realizes his mistakes as soon as he sees Annie’s Cheshire cat grin. “And how _is_ your good friend Sam?”

“Stop it.”

“Stop what?”

“Saying friend like you think he’s my boyfriend.”

“He is your boyfriend.”

“No he’s not,” John says, in a tone that he probably thinks slams the door on her when all it really says is how much he wishes her belief was corroborated by real life, because there is nothing more pathetic than John Royce when he’s head over heels.

“John. You get dinner together every Friday you’re both free. You run together every morning. You’ve made more friends in his office than yours. You spent Christmas together.”

“As friends.”

“You _spent Christmas_ together. For _three days_. On his _couch_. _Baking_. All that was missing was sloppy make-outs and groping and you would have been the picture of domesticity.”

“You have a bizarre image of domesticity.”

Annie cleans her spoon and flicks him with it. “ _Not the point_ , Royce.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“I prefer Annie.” Annie ignores his groan. “What are you going to do about Sam?”

The look on John’s face says he’s uncomfortable, but not enough not to keep pushing. The topic of Sam Gerard has a way of distracting him, because his taste is atrocious, and Annie has learned over a lifetime of knowing John to leverage any advantage in her favor. “Should I be concerned that you’re this invested in my nonexistent love life?”

Annie picks up her spoon, gestures to the room, gestures to the clock, then gestures to herself. “You’re on my couch at one a.m. pining after a guy like a teenage girl. It’s for my sanity.”

“I am not pining.”

“You’re on my couch at one a.m. with my favorite ice cream talking about Sam for approximately the five billionth time since you moved to Chicago. They put your high school yearbook photo next to the dictionary definition of pining in the first week of November.” She shakes her spoon at him. “So what are you going to do about it? Before I end up in a padded room. Because if they revoke my license due to insanity, John, I will have no choice but to strangle you with my straightjacket.”

John steals her spoon and a scoop of the ice cream, which Annie steals back immediately. “I’m waiting for the right moment.”

“Coward.”

“It’s not that simple.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s Sam.”

“So I’ve been told. What’s your point?”

“It’s _Sam_ ,” John repeats, as though that explains anything other than him being head over heels for him. “I can’t just bring it up out of nowhere.”

“Why not? He’s a stubborn jackass. It works perfectly on you.” Annie catches the pillow John chucks at her and heaves it back at his face.

“Don’t quit your day job to do stand-up,” John says flatly, pulling off his tie to drop in a heap on the coffee table. “Trust me. You haven’t met Sam.”

“Yeah, I haven’t,” Annie returns, “because someone’s a coward and hasn’t gotten his shit together yet.”

“You done?”

“Depends.” She holds up the pint, grinning. “How much more of this do you have?”

She was only mostly kidding about her sanity though.

Because it doesn’t. Fucking. _Stop_.

If it were anyone else crushing like a twelve-year-old girl, Annie would think it’s hilarious. Except it’s John, and John has it _so_ bad. Which would be a good thing, after Daniel, except that John has it _so_ bad for _Sam Gerard_ and it is still the aftermath of Daniel. Which means that John is playing it safe and waiting for a sign from Sam, except that it’s Sam Gerard, and Sam Gerard is so far in the closet he makes Narnia look like a trip to the corner store and also Sam Gerard might be the one person on the planet who’s more of a stubborn jackass than John. And that would be a good sign for Sam’s odds of keeping up with John, if he ever decided to do something about it like John so clearly wants him to.

Except, to repeat, Sam Gerard might be the only person on the planet who’s more of a stubborn jackass than John. So he just keeps inviting John into his life without giving a clear indication of whether he wants to be friends with John, have badly-negotiated one-night stands with John, marry John, or anything between the three.

Annie has been trying to make sense of it for months, she really has, but at this point, the mixed signals from Sam are more like a Beijing traffic jam. He could decide to keep John forever or tell him to fuck off. And the force of habit that keeps John calm and collected around Sam only to quietly panic with Annie later is going to give Annie a coronary.

Her only consolation is that John is just as much of an unapologetic asshole as Sam, which is exactly what Sam deserves. This is completely irrelevant to the fact that John deserves nothing less than the world on a silver platter, and Sam is a goddamn idiot if he hasn’t figured that out yet.

So on a Thursday night, when John tells her Sam has been unusually cold and distant for a week and a half, Annie reassures him that it’s probably just another of Sam’s inexplicable weather patterns with a sinking feeling in her chest. Because this is probably the moment that Sam finally works up the nerve to shove John out of his life. So she stocks up on supplies the next morning and reminds herself that while this is definitely going to suck, it’s better for Sam to get it over with now instead of stringing John along for years.

Then John vanishes off the face of the planet on Friday, and Annie spends the first half of her Friday graveyard shift terrified John did something stupid, darting to the phone whenever she can get away without ever being able to reach him. The second half of her shift dissolves into a circus after a massive car accident on the highway, but that does nothing for her worry.

So when she gets home at dawn to a litany of voicemails informing her that Thomas Abbott killed himself on Thursday night, it takes five tries and ten minutes of staring at the phone to work up the cognitive capacity to start frantically dialing. Because now she’s absolutely certain that John has done something stupid, whether or not Sam has anything to do with it.

She stands in the same spot until noon chasing down everyone in her address book, trying to figure out what happened to Thomas while trying and failing to figure out where the fuck John is. When the last person on her list hangs up with the promise to call the minute they hear anything, she takes a breath, dials the hospital, and begs one of the other residents to take over her Saturday night shift, saying in a dull voice that one of her friends is in crisis and she has to stay by the phone in case they need her, getting out the words out only by virtue of having shut off her conscious mind six hours ago. Then all she has is the dial tone and the ringing silence in her kitchen and the crushing weight of the last two days bearing down on her.

Annie takes a shaky breath. Then she hangs up the phone, sinks to the floor, hugs her knees to her chest, and sobs until she can’t breathe. For Thomas, for John, for herself.

She doesn’t move from the phone until the early hours of Sunday morning, when Steve and James call to tell her that John is in their spare room and has probably been drinking since he landed in New York Saturday morning. She makes them swear on their lives to keep an eye on him and return him in more or less easily re-attachable pieces. They promise to keep her apprised. Then she does the rounds again with their friends, who are all varying flavors of mess and all promise to do what they can to help Steve and James keep John from doing something beyond Annie’s powers to save him.

Steve and James let her know that John is taking a red-eye to Chicago Tuesday morning and that all forms of alcoholic anything are stowed out of reach so John is vaguely sober for the flight and mostly sober for work on Tuesday morning. Annie remembers that John was on loan to the Marshals at the end of last week and will likely be there on Tuesday, which means close contact with Sam.

So Annie makes a plan and steels herself, hoping she’s showing up at the right place in time.

Naturally, her patients don’t know she needs to swoop in to help her idiot best friend, so she has to sprint to make it to the Marshals office in time. She spots John and shouts, running until she can run right into him and hug him, letting go only so she can get a good look at his face.

He’s unmistakably wrung out and shaken and probably had a bitch of a headache on the plane, but still. He’s here. He’s back. He’s in surprisingly good shape, all things considered. He’ll be alright.

Annie’s so relieved it takes her a minute to realize that John is with three other people--John’s coworker Hannah Hill who John’s gay male descriptions _tragically_ short-changed, a Marshal named Cosmo Renfro who looks like he’s enough of a menace to have that name without getting beat up on the playground, and Sam.

She’s not sure what she expected, but it somehow didn’t include black eyes steady as a surgeon’s hand, a face made of angles and lines sharp enough to bleed a man dry, and an expression of cool reserve that rounds out his aura of a predator biding its time. If John is all noise and movement, Sam is a graveyard on the other side of the world, a forbidding face made attractive by virtue of sharp intelligence.

She doesn’t get the appeal, but then, her tastes run more toward Hannah Hill, who has curly hair that Annie kind of wants to nuzzle and freckles everywhere that Annie kind of wants to lick, because she is a completely useless lesbian.

But what catches her eye, though, is the pan flash of something in Sam’s face that he’s not quite fast enough to hide when John introduces them.

Jealousy. Sam Gerard is jealous of her.

And isn’t that just _fascinating_.

Still, Annie did come here for a reason, so she pulls her attention back from John’s pretty coworker and Sam’s cool gaze. She offers to drag John out for a drink, even though she’s pretty sure he doesn’t need one but probably could do with one before she cuts him off for the next month and trots out photos of desiccated livers.

Then again, there’s a tiny but mighty part of her that wants to see what Sam does.

Sam is agreeable. Which she knows is unexpected, because John looks suspicious. But his suspicion rolls off Sam like water on glass, unable to wash it away.

Sam is _very_ jealous, Annie knows, and she’d never be able to tell if she hadn’t surprised him.

Leave it to John to fall for a bastard who’s both repressed _and_ possessive. Annie files that away for later use and hauls John to a tiny dive bar near the hospital. She knows John’s been drinking enough to drown the entire weekend, though, because he gets a beer and barely touches it.

“How’re you holding up?” She'll sit him down to unspool his grief, but not yet, not here, because he's still just this side of functional and she's not ready to unspool hers either without curling into a ball and not moving for at least a month. Also, his liver isn’t recovered enough yet to handle the amount of alcohol required for _her_ liver to be ready to unspool this.

“What do you think?”

“That this morning was the first time you’ve been sober since Friday afternoon.”

“That about covers it,” he mutters, shaking his head when she reaches in her purse for ibuprofen. “I’m fine.”

“You look like shit.”

“No, really?” Much though she loves John, she’s grateful she didn’t have to deal with him this morning--he’s truly pathetic when hungover. “This morning is the first time I’ve been both conscious and sober in the last 72 hours, and Thomas’s funeral was right in the middle of it.”

“Yeah.” She rubs one hand on his shoulder, so as not to punch him for scaring her shitless, because they made an agreement not to deck each other when hungover and also he would probably break in half and then so would she and then it would just be an ugly mess. “I didn’t hear about it until I got off on Saturday morning and you weren’t answering your phone. I didn’t know where the hell you were until Steve and James called to let me know your drunk ass was crashing in their spare room for the funeral.”

John grips her hand briefly, enough to remind her that he’s there, that he’s fine, and that he's sorry. “Sorry for scaring you.”

“Please tell me you weren’t drinking alone.”

“I wasn’t drinking alone.”

“Don’t lie, John.”

“I’m not.” He takes a gulp of his beer. Working up his nerve, and it’s not encouraging alcohol was the first resort. Fortunately, she doesn’t need to pry it out of him. “Sam was there.”

That…takes a solid minute to compute. “Sam? Sam Gerard?”

“That’s the one.” In this light, John looks like he hasn’t slept in 72 hours either. It’s also not encouraging that he felt like he had to work up his nerve for this, but that might still be the aftershocks of Thomas’s funeral.

“Why was Sam there?” Because it’s also not encouraging that John spent his hours before the plane ride with Sam, given that all of last week had the eerie signs of an impending not-quite-breakup-because-they-were-never-actually-together, and Thomas’s suicide seems like exactly the kind of emotional storm front that Sam would freeze out. And if Sam is partially responsible for John drinking for three days straight, Annie will have no choice but to gut him.

“We planned another Friday dinner at my apartment. I kind of forgot he was coming.”

“Do I need to kick his ass?”

“Down girl,” John mutters, meeting her flat glare with tired eyes that brighten a little as he starts talking again. “He was just, he was there. He was great, actually.” A tiny smile escapes that says John means it. “He listened. Told me about a friend of his who was positive too, got my sorry ass to the airport in the morning and let my sorry ass stay on the phone with him for an hour after the funeral. And he dragged Hill and I into his office and scared everyone into leaving us alone all day. So no,” he gives her a warning look, “no need for ass-kicking.”

Something about it leads Annie to think Sam was there all night on Friday, and John being in surprisingly decent shape today speaks well to Sam’s restorative powers. 

“You’re thinking about kicking his ass, aren’t you?”

“No, actually.” She smiles at him and means it, which is a refreshing feeling where Sam is concerned. “I’m glad.”

John’s face says he’s waiting for a trick. “You are?”

“Yes.” She nudges him gently with her shoulder, still smiling. “It was sweet of Sam to do that.”

“Oh God.” John looks around the dive bar like he’s looking for an escape route. It’s the size of a shoebox, though, so he’s out of luck. “Please don’t make this a thing.”

“Why not?”

“Because it’s not a thing.”

“John.”

“It’s not a thing. He was there as a friend. You would have done the same.”

“Sure I would.”

“So why is it a thing when he does it and not when you do it?”

“Because I can objectively say Sam is an asshole.” She nudges him harder this time. “He cares about you.”

“I said don’t make this a thing.”

“Good thing I don’t listen to you.”

“You’re going to tell me to talk to him, aren’t you?”

“It’s almost as if we’ve had this conversation before,” Annie says in her driest tone, ignoring John’s eye roll.

“I was drunk and pathetic. He took pity on me.”

She arches one unimpressed eyebrow, because Sam is an asshole who doesn’t know the meaning of the word.

“Fine, he kept me from breaking something.”

“Are you going to stop being deliberately dense anytime this year, or do you need me to staple it to your forehead?”

It’s a statement of how tired John is that he lets a breath out. And somewhere in that thick skull, Annie thinks, he might be letting himself hope.

“Look, you know I don’t love Sam.” John’s face says that’s the understatement of the decade. “I’m just saying he surprised me with Thomas. So stop being a damn coward and do something about it.”

John shakes his head, but when he looks at her again his face is warm. At least a bit of that sunk in, which Annie will celebrate as the victory it is. “I owe you one, Annie.”

“You’ve owed me one for fifteen years,” she replies, “but if you introduce me to Hill, we’ll call it even for now.”

“Hill? Seriously?”

“Yes.”

“Special Agent Hannah Hill?”

“That’s the one.”

“Special Agent Hannah Hill who I work with on a daily basis?”

“Do you know any other Special Agent Hannah Hills?”

“Did you miss the part where I work with her on a daily basis?” John’s voice is light, but his face is tight and gray.

“I’m not going to walk up to her with a sign around my neck saying ‘John Royce is gay’. I just want to buy her a drink.” 

“She can’t know,” John says, and that sudden wash of fear hits Annie like a slap in the face. Between Daniel and Sam and how well John hides it, it’s easy to forget how much the last year has shaken him, how unsafe he really feels now, how little safety he had left to lose when Thomas’s suicide blew it away. “She cannot know, Annie. None of them can know.” 

“John,” Annie softens her voice as if dangling a bone in front of an antsy street dog. “Me buying her a drink has zero correlation to you being gay. All she’ll get from that is that I’m a lesbian. That has nothing to do with you. None of it will ever come back to you, and I won’t tell her anything you don’t want me to. You know that, right?”

John’s sigh says he doesn’t, and that in itself is concerning. “I worry about you, you know.”

She snorts, trying to lighten the mood. “Awww, I’m touched.”

“I mean it, Annie,” he says, his voice quiet and serious as though she hasn’t said anything. “I don’t want you to get hurt.”

Annie sets down her drink and holds onto his hand, trying to pull him out of his head and back into the bar with her. “I’ll be fine. I can take care of myself.” She lets go and nods to the Glock still at his hip. “Besides, you get first dibs on shooting someone on the off chance I can’t take care of myself.”

“Oh don’t worry, that was the plan,” John mutters, taking a long pull of his drink.

“That better mean I get first dibs on poisoning someone if you can’t take care of yourself.”

The look he gives her is entirely too suspicious for his own health. “You sound way too eager about the prospect of poisoning Sam.”

“Plausible deniability,” she sings. “Besides, this conversation is concrete evidence that your taste is worse than mine. You have no leg to stand on.”

“Fuck you, Eastman.”

“Not even on your birthday, Royce.” 

“I’ll get the two of you in the same place,” John sighs. “You can stop by after work and I’ll make sure she’s there, but that’s it.”

She beams. “That’s all I need.” She darts forward to peck him on the cheek, ignoring his eye roll. “You’re the best.”

“And don’t you forget it.”

“Your turn. What are you going to do about Sam?” He groans. “Oh come on, you didn’t honestly think you were getting off that easy.”

“I’ll talk to him.”

“When?”

“Tomorrow.”

“After you go running?”

“What? No.”

“Why?”

“Because if he says no I’ll have to face him at work all day and it will be awkward as shit.”

“Coward.”

“Damn straight.” John fiddles with his glass, glaring when Annie stares and waits. “I’ll bring coffee or something in the morning. Set up another Friday dinner. Then I’ll mention it.”

“After the coffee?”

“At Friday dinner.”

“Coward.”

“Yeah, I am. I want to hold onto us being friends a little longer before I set it on fire. Sue me.”

If Annie ever needed confirmation her best friend is a goddamn moron, this is it. “Sweetie, I hate to tell you this, but if you really think you and Sam were ever just friends, you're in even deeper denial than he is.”

“I really hate to tell you this, but sometimes you’re wrong.”

“Twenty bucks says I’m not.”

“I’ll gladly take your money.”

Annie just sips her drink and doesn’t tell him that this is one of those times where she is absolutely not wrong, at least about them never being just friends.

She hopes.

She really, _really_ hopes. And not for the sake of the twenty.

Sam is nothing at all like Daniel, she thinks that night, at home alone in her apartment not paying attention to the TV, which is both a good thing and half the problem. It lessens Annie’s initial worry that John imprinted on him like a baby duckling because Sam Gerard happened to be there when Mark Sheridan was captured.

And yes, there were many ways in which Daniel and John were poorly matched. John was too abrasive, his native language a certain kind of sharpness in which Daniel never achieved fluency, which regularly resulted in miscommunication and John apologizing for being an unrepentant asshole only to repeat the cycle over and over again. Daniel couldn’t quite manage to pull back the worse floods of John’s recklessness, including the floods of recklessness related to John being in love with him. He never quite mastered the art of keeping John away from stupid risks, especially those related to John being in love with him, which was part of why they fell apart in the end. 

On the other hand, Daniel was gentle. Daniel was kind. Daniel was willing to take a risk on John. And Sam Gerard is nothing like Daniel Ward.

That’s what Annie’s not quite sure how to broach. She doesn’t know Sam well enough to know if Sam’s not willing to take a risk because he doesn’t think John is worth it or if Sam is so certain that John is worth it that he’ll never let himself take the risk for fear of destroying John’s life.

Annie wants to believe the latter, given how often Sam keeps inviting John back into his orbit and the grace with which he seems to accept difficult subjects. But then, Sam proved himself quite capable of being cruel within two days of meeting John, and that Annie can’t forgive.

Then again, a week ago she wouldn’t have thought Sam capable of being as gentle as he was about Thomas, as present and careful and aware as he would have had to be to get John in as decent shape as he was in by the end of Tuesday. Maybe her original estimate of him was wrong, and it would be nice, for John’s sake, to be proven wrong. Also for the sake of her own sanity, but mostly for John’s sake.

So when something shifts after Thomas’s death, Annie can only watch in abject horror as Sam gets increasingly vicious and John gets increasingly vicious right back. Which is how Annie resumes her new favorite pastime of contemplating Sam Gerard’s murder.

A shot of oxygen between the toes would do nicely, but that would require access to his feet, which she imagines is something akin to bathing a cat if said cat owned a Glock. She could swap out his IV fluids if he came in with a gunshot wound, but then the anesthesiologist might go down for it, and also, that assumes some lucky bastard can manage to land a bullet on Sam fucking Gerard, which seems to be astonishingly difficult given how often he stares down the business end of a gun. He’s almost old enough for a heart attack to be plausible, except she knows John goes running with him every morning, which means Gerard’s heart is probably in irritatingly good health. Physically, anyway. Emotionally is another story, which is why John’s driving himself up the walls, which sets Annie once more down the endless cycle of plotting Sam Gerard’s murder.

“Hon,” says Maureen, the nurse on her ward who can scare even the most irate patient into cooperation, “only reason to be this fussed over a man is if you’re dating or married.”

“He’s not my boyfriend, and I’m not his type,” Annie replies, flipping through a patient chart. She doesn’t add that he’s not hers either, because that would sound desperate without the qualifier that he’s too male to be her type.

Maureen’s face says _lame excuse, dear._ “What is his type then?”

 _Old_ _,_ _male_ _, and_ _Texan with the personality of a pissed off Rottweiler_. “Unattainable.”

“Then he’s got terrible taste,” Lydia, another resident, calls from a few feet away.

“You’re telling me, Lyds.”

Bastard will probably live a thousand years, she thinks bitterly, all while _she_ ruins her own cardiac health thinking about killing him for trampling on her best friend’s idiot heart.

The things she does for John Royce.

A few weeks after plotting Sam’s murder and talking John down from a ledge becomes as much a part of her daily ritual as brushing her teeth, Annie jolts awake at early a.m. on a Sunday to the sound of John shouting for her and banging on her door. She flies out of bed, making sure he hears every stomp on the way and shouting down the hall as she goes. “John Royce, I have just come off a fourteen-hour shift and I have been asleep for fifteen minutes and we had a batch of kids in a bus crash and so help me God,” she gets to the door and yanks it open, “someone had better be--

Then Annie gets a good look at John, in yesterday’s clothes looking about as shell shocked and shattered as he did after Daniel got shot, and she hugs him as hard as she can. “Are you okay?” She loosens her grip only long enough to try to get a read on his face, but he won’t meet her eye. “Whose body am I burying?”

“No one,” John murmurs, which means it’s worse than Annie thought.

She drags him through her door and sits him at her kitchen table, bustling around to make a pot of coffee and possibly locate the remains of a handle of vodka. A glance over her shoulder finds John with his elbows on the table and his head in his hands. “What happened? Is it a work thing?” When that doesn’t get a reply, she wracks her brain. “You had that judge you were protecting last night, right? Did something go wrong?”

“I slept with Sam,” John says, muffled by the hands he’s still hiding his face in.

Annie drops the coffee pot on the counter with a loud clatter, spinning around to gape. “ _What?_ ”

“Please don’t make me repeat it.”

“ _You slept with Sam?”_

“I don’t think they heard you in _Taiwan_ ,” John snaps, reeking of misery.

Annie takes the coffee pot and two mugs and sets both on her kitchen table, pushes the biggest mug she owns in front of John, and sits. “Start from the beginning.”

Which is how Annie gets the story of how badly the event with Judge O’Connor went sideways, complete with a mob-hit-that-wasn’t, Sam stepping in front of a shooter without his gun, followed swiftly by John stepping in front of the shooter in Sam’s way, topped off with CPD nearly shooting all of them for their trouble and Sam and John getting forcibly separated before they could kill each other in front of a room full of witnesses. And if that wasn’t traumatic enough, John went to Sam’s apartment at a time of night when no good decisions have ever been made, and they fought, and instead of shooting each other like reasonable people, Sam _fucking finally_ admitted that John wasn’t imagining things. Which isn’t as much of a victory as Annie thought it would be, because Sam is somehow even more afraid than even Annie’s worst estimations, and that somehow turned into angry-validation-of-life-sex and John waking up in the morning alone.

“Wait, you spent the night?” John’s groan into his hands answers that. “What the _fuck_ , John?”

“Adrenaline wore off,” he snaps, looking up from his hands to glare at her in clear exhaustion. “In case you forgot, we were arguing about him stepping in front of a shooter.”

“ _Fuck_.”

“Not helpful,” John mutters, guzzling his coffee like he’ll find God hiding somewhere at the bottom, or better still, answers.

Annie shakes her head, takes a deep breath. “So, wait. What do you mean he wasn’t there?”

“I woke up and he wasn’t in the apartment. Bed was cold. So I got my stuff and left.”

She’s going to _kill_ that motherfucker. But first, she has John falling apart at her kitchen table. “What did Sam say? When you were arguing?”

“He said he’s not Daniel Ward.”

 _He’s not wrong_ , Annie thinks, which. Not helpful. She takes a deep breath, refocuses her brain. John needs her. “What did he mean?”

John snorts. It’s a bitter sound that makes Annie want to break something. Sam Gerard’s face, for example. “I’m pretty sure he just wanted me to punch him and leave.”

“Yeah, I got that.” Even by John’s standards, this is a complete goddamn catastrophe. Which is saying something, because Annie was there for the flaming catastrophe that was 1984. “I mean, what else did he say? What was the context?”

“Must we recount this?”

“Only if you want my help.”

John doesn’t look like he wants her help if that’s the sticker price, but he continues on anyway in a dull voice, clinging to his coffee mug for dear life. “He was jealous of you. I told him you were the one who told me to stop being a coward and make a move, and he said more the fool you.”

Annie bites down hard on her tongue and forces herself not to think of the sharp objects she can acquire to gouge Sam’s eyes out because she can only get John to say this once.

“I told him to tell me I was imagining things and I would go away. He choked out yes. I called him a liar. He agreed and said he wasn’t going to do anything about it. I said give me one good reason why you shouldn’t do anything about it. He said he’s not Daniel Ward.”

John shrugs, staring at his mug like he’s hoping she won’t press, which lets her know she needs to. “Then what?”

There’s a strangled noise in John’s throat.

“John? Then what?”

A beat. Annie prepares herself for the long task of gently coaching it out of him, but then John speaks again in a wavering tone. “I kissed him. He pushed himself away and wouldn’t look at me. I was about to leave but,” John scrunches up his eyes when his voice falters, takes a long breath, and plows on even quieter than before, “he stopped me and kissed me.” John’s eyes flick up to Annie, then back to his mug. “The rest you know.”

“Okay.” This is infinitely worse than what Annie hoped would happen. And Sam has once again proven that he has a talent for leaving shattered bits of John in his wake. Even so. The signs from Sam are telling. Enough to finally complete the portrait she’s been trying to color in for months. She can work with that. “You want to know what I think?”

“Will that stop you from telling me anyway?”

“If you don’t want me to, yes.”

John pauses, then tilts his head.

“I think he’s afraid of hurting you.”

John snorts. Annie’s going to kill Sam Gerard after this.

“Just hear me out?”

John looks like he’s staring over the edge of a cliff, but he doesn’t protest.

“He wouldn’t sleep with you after Daniel even though he could have. Which says he’s not the kind of asshole to take advantage. He’s been holding you at arm’s length since you got here, even though he kept inviting you in. Which says that he wants you there, but he’s scared to let you be there. And when I showed up, there was a chance in his mind that you could be safe, so he decided to let you take it, even though he was jealous enough of me to be a complete bastard for weeks. My guess is he was trying to do the same thing he did when he said he’s not Daniel--he was trying to make you hate him and push him away to make sure you took the safe option. Add in last night and it sounds like he really, _really_ doesn’t want to make you hate him and he’s so terrified of the alternative that he’s willing to make you hate him anyway. All of which tells me he’d rather hurt himself than hurt you.” Granted, Sam is also excellent at hurting John, for which Annie will beat him to death with a shovel, but not before John takes his swing.

John’s face goes sour. “You got one part right.”

“Which one?”

John’s knuckles go white on the mug. “He’d rather hurt himself. He just…” His jaw shifts and his gaze flies around the kitchen as if looking for an attacker, or something to attack. They’re back in John’s anger and fear from last night. “He takes these _stupid_ risks. Like he doesn’t give a shit about the consequences. Like he doesn’t give a shit that he could get _shot_.”

John’s voice cracks on _shot_ , and Annie leans out of her chair to hug him again. They’re not entirely talking about Sam anymore, but somehow all of John’s fears can be encompassed by that one word. “Hey, it’s okay.”

“No, it isn’t.” John pulls away from her and she sits back down to see him listless.

“No, it isn’t. But it will be.”

“I’m really,” he gives a small hysterical laugh, “really not feeling that optimistic.”

“Then I’ll be optimistic for both of us.” She grabs one hand off his mug and holds on. “You’re both hurting right now. So take the day and get some air. Then _talk to him_.” Annie situates herself so John can’t look away from her. “And get him to talk to you. Give him a chance to explain. And give him a chance to see that he doesn’t need to be afraid for you. He might surprise you like he did last night.” 

“Yeah.” John sounds like he’s run a marathon, pulling back and away from her again.

Annie sighs. She’s said her piece, and she knows John well enough to know this is as far as she’s going to get. “Let me make you breakfast.”

“No,” John shakes his head like he’s trying to shake himself awake, standing up from the table. “I should get going.”

“John, you look like shit.” She catches his elbow to little resistance, but he’s not sitting back down, either. “Stay here. Sleep on my couch. Take a shower.”

He just shakes his head. “I’ve taken up enough of your morning.”

He’s pushing her away, is what he’s doing. Annie calculates the relative risk of leaving John to his own devices versus trying to trap him here and having him lock her out more forcefully. She sighs and grabs her keys. “Let me drive you home.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“John.”

“Annie.”

She sighs and sets her keys back down. She does walk him to the door though, and catches him to hug him again before he can escape, holding as tight as she can without regard for the fact that John just stands and waits for her to stop. “It’ll be okay. You know that, right?”

“Thanks Annie,” he murmurs, and then he’s gone.

He avoids her for a solid week. By Saturday, she’s making spaghetti while strongly considering the merits of knocking Sam Gerard’s door with a baseball bat only to be interrupted by a knock on her own door.

John, the asshole, is standing there with a bottle of cabernet.

Annie gets one look at his face and lets out the longest breath she’s taken all year. “Oh thank _God_.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You’re a goddamn idiot.” She takes the wine bottle and smacks him upside the head, ignoring his squawk of indignation.

“What the hell was that for?”

“For being a goddamn idiot. You had me scared to death.” Then she hugs him, drags him into her kitchen, and brandishes the wine opener at him. “Now we’re going to open this and you’re going to use your words and tell me how you and your boyfriend _finally got your shit together_.”

John laughs, lighter than he’s sounded in months. Annie decides she probably won’t use the baseball bat on Sam. For now anyway.

Jury’s still out on her idiot best friend, though.

If John was head over heels before, he’s somehow even worse now, and it’s so disgustingly sweet it’s going to give Annie diabetes. She never thought she’d be happy about diabetes, and yet. John Royce.

Who _won’t fucking introduce her to Hannah Hill, you asshole_. Annie lets him off the hook for a little while, figuring it’s better to see if this thing with Sam holds up. After two months, though, it becomes clear Sam’s going to stick around long enough to definitely give Annie diabetes, and she decides John can tolerate a bit of friendly harassment in the name of his best friend’s crush.

And he finally, _finally_ , agrees to bring Hannah down with him on his way out to meet Sam for Friday dinner because he and Sam might secretly be an old married couple.

“Don’t test me,” John replies. “And we are _not_ an old married couple.”

“You’re giving me diabetes. That’s how much of a gross old married couple you are. You even bicker as a first language.” Then Annie pauses long enough to take a breath and realizes she’s actually gotten John to agree to introduce her to Hannah, who is distractingly adorable and may or may not be straight.

Fuck.

“Paging Dr. Eastman?” She blinks back to Earth and John looking encouraging. “You got this, doc.”

“Don’t call me doc.” _Fuck_. “What if I don’t got this?”

“None of that,” John replies, flicking her arm. “You’re the smartest person I know.”

“She’s an FBI agent.”

“And you’re a badass doctor who saves people.”

“She’s pretty.”

“So are you.”

“You’re gay.”

“Sweetie, if I weren’t gay, I’d do you.”

“You swear?”

“On Barbara Streisand.” John pushes her off the couch in the direction of her bedroom. “Go. Date night clothes. Get the leather jacket and the dark red lipstick.”

“It’s burgundy, you useless gay man,” Annie calls over her shoulder, even though she gets both because they worked wonders for her in Manhattan.

Which is how Annie shows up on a Friday night wearing her leather jacket and her best lipstick and thanking every patient who didn’t die a bloody death for allowing her to show up looking ready to woo a girl, because Hannah steps out of the elevator with John in a navy blouse and a sunburst necklace and Annie almost checks her own pulse for arrhythmia.

Hannah freezes a little when she sees Annie and John steps in front of her looking sheepish. Annie can’t hear what he’s because she’s praying to whatever lesbian deity is listening that Hannah Hill isn’t straight. Whatever John’s saying, it’s not clarifying anything, because Hannah glances between John and Annie like she has no damn clue what’s happening. “…okay?”

“And my good, good, dear friend of mine is the actual worst,” _fuck you too, John,_ Annie thinks, because her cue is coming and this is totally fine, “and wanted me to do something for her.”

“...sure?”

“So, see, my friend, Annie has been asking me about you.” Oh Christ no, what the fuck happened to just getting Hannah there? And yet, John is still talking and getting more awkward with every successive word. “Because she thinks the fact that you saved my ass on multiple occasions makes you a great person, which it does, and she’d like to get to know you. Sometime. After work. Because she’d like to get to know you.”

Annie’s palm hits her forehead on instinct. Mostly so she doesn’t use that hand to separate John’s tongue from his useless gay brain. “Jesus fuck, John. Shut up and go away now.”

John is smirking like the utter jackass he is. “Gladly.” Then John spins on his heel to head toward the parking garage before Annie can smack him, calling over his shoulder, “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do!”

“Moron,” Annie shouts after him.

“You’re welcome,” he sings back, cackling like the shit he is when she flips him off.

Then it’s just Annie and Hannah, and this is fine. This is totally fine.

 _Be cool. You’ve got a medical degree and you deal with critically injured people for a living. You can be cool_. Annie spins and immediately knows she’s full of shit, then smiles and kicks her useless lesbian brain into order because she’s got a girl to ask out. “Hi Hannah, I’m Annie. What my dipshit friend was trying to say is that I’m a hopeless lesbian and if that’s relevant information to you, I would very much like to buy you a drink.”

Smooth. Real smooth. Fuck. Annie fixes her smile on her face in a way that probably makes her look insane.

Hannah blinks at her and looks more than a bit like she’s having a mental bluescreen. It’s kind of adorable. Also 1000% not calming.

“So?” This is fine. This is fine. This may or may not be fine. “What do you say?”

“Yes!” Hannah blurts. “Yes.” She shakes her hair into order as her brain comes back online and it is _very distracting_ and the yes doesn’t quite sink in.

 _Focus._ “Yes?” Annie’s smiling wide enough to hurt her face. 

“Yes.” Hannah gets a proper look at the date night lipstick, and Annie kind of wants her to get a proper look all evening. “Now?”

“If you’re free.” _Please be free. Please be free_.

“Yeah.” Hannah straightens, grinning. “I’m definitely free now.” 

Annie will deny before God and especially John Royce that she did a victory dance in her head. She offers up the name of a bar she happens to know close by, and Hannah agrees.

As it turns out, Hannah’s only the nonthreatening one because Burkhardt and Wang are more obnoxious and John is more of an asshole. This is apparently why she can keep up with Burkhardt and Wang’s collective absurdity and John’s assholery. She’s also perceptive enough to see through John’s resting state of assholery and actually _like_ the stupid bastard, which is when Annie decides this one might be worth keeping. At least for another drink.

A drink turns into another drink turns into a movie turns into dinner turns into the two of them in Annie’s apartment with red wine, which is when Annie almost bursts a lung laughing upon learning that Hannah thought she and John were a couple. “Oh _God_ no. He’s not my type and I’m not his.”

Hannah pauses and blinks. “What do you mean?”

Annie’s brain screeches to a halt and turns into a steady chant of _fuck fuck fucking fuck_. She _promised_ John she wouldn’t tell Hannah anything he didn’t want her to, and he definitely did not want her to tell Hannah that. Or suggest it. Or astral project it.

…then again, Hannah doesn’t look all that surprised. She looks like she’s fishing, because she doesn’t know Annie well enough yet to know how to lie to her.

Annie does a rapid risk calculation. Hannah works with John, but she’s also a lesbian in the FBI, which means she’s the last person in a position to judge John for being gay. There’s also at least a 50/50 chance Hannah has already guessed, both because she’s perceptive enough to see through John’s constant bullshit and because she’s fishing.

Annie takes a deep breath and hopes that maybe, just maybe, this is a sign that someone might be there to keep John’s dumb ass safe when she’s can’t, reminding herself that Hannah’s a lesbian in the FBI. “To be clear, I’m only telling you this because I already know,” she gestures between them, “that you won’t be an asshole about it.”

Hannah practically melts in relief. “You know Royce is gay?”

Annie rolls her eyes even as relief floods her down to her toes. As if John has a subtle bone in his body. “I’ve known John since I was two. Of course I know. It just took him until he was twenty to work up the balls to actually tell me.” Or rather, worked up the nerve to finally say something to her, because he was so turned around and terrified of Howard and Maria that he was terrified of Annie too, and even eight years later with Howard and Maria both dead Annie still hasn’t forgiven them for doing that to their son.

Hannah’s relieved, but her appraising look hasn’t quite gone away. “Mostly for my own edification, what is his type?”

“I have a suspicion he’s head over heels for someone at work,” Annie says, because Hannah is definitely still fishing and she can play it off as someone else if she had to. 

As it turns out, though, she doesn’t have to. As it turns out, Hannah already knew about Sam Gerard, though it takes a solid minute of processing to equate the name coming out of Hannah’s mouth with the Sam that John has been crushing on harder than a twelve-year-old girl. And Hannah was apparently just as worried as Annie about tiptoeing around the issue of Sam and John in case Annie didn’t know, which gives John entirely too much credit for being subtle.

Then again, they can agree that they have much, _much_ better things to do than dissect her best friend’s atrocious taste in men. So they get on with doing those much, _much_ better things to do, and which Hannah, to Annie’s delight, is quite good at doing.

Of course, John’s atrocious taste in men, along with John himself, are never far from her life, though she hasn’t seen as much of him in the time she’s gone on four dates with Hannah and John has carried on being disgustingly sweet with Sam. So Annie wrangles John to herself that Thursday on the promise of Thai food. In part to thank him for following through, but also because, now that she thinks about it, she owes him a question.

“You said you were just going to get her there. What the hell was that?”

“Well I was,” John says, waving his chopsticks in defense, “but you were nervous. You couldn’t be nervous if you were yelling at me for being an idiot. Besides, you like her. You were excited. It was adorable. I couldn’t toss her to you in good conscience without at least trying to make sure it would work out in your favor.”

Annie facepalms hard enough to see stars. “John.”

“Annie.”

“I love you dearly.”

“Love you too, sugarplum.”

“But you are gayer than a tree full of monkeys high on nitrogen oxide.”

“I hadn’t noticed,” John says mildly.

“Gayer. Tree. Monkeys. High.”

“You going somewhere with this?”

“You are as smooth with women as I am with men. Which is to say twenty miles of bad road staring down a long-haul ice trucker in the middle of winter in Alaska. So please, _for the love of God_ , stick to talking dirty to your boyfriend and leave women to me.” 

John grins a grin that would get a saint drop-kicked into hell. Or at the very least, get him laid. “Worked out pretty well for you, didn’t it?”

Except that, for all his efforts to help, John doesn’t seem to want to know anything about Hannah. Or rather, he’s more than willing to listen to Annie talk about Hannah and always seems genuinely interested, but he never actually asks. He doesn’t seem to want to know that Annie’s talking about Hannah _Hill_ , skirts around anything that would force him to reconcile his Hill and Annie’s Hannah. It annoys Annie for a while until she realizes John isn’t that forthcoming with information about him and Sam either, makes polite if lame excuses to beg off introducing Sam to Annie as readily as he finds reasons to be elsewhere and know nothing about it if there’s any possibility that Hannah might be around.

At first, she thinks it’s because Sam is skittish. Historically, the only reason John hid his relationships from her was because his other half was so far in the closet as to be buried in the foundations or because John’s choice in partners was particularly embarrassing. On one hand, she’s already given him so much shit about Sam and he’s unapologetically pined so damn much that there’s no logical reason John would be embarrassed. Then again, this doesn’t have the flavor of closeted-partner-evasiveness.

It takes longer than it should to realize that John is skittish—at least as skittish as Annie can only assume Sam is—and then only when John’s evasiveness about Sam turns into evasiveness about Hannah on a night when Annie happens to be in a less forgiving mood.

“John, she knows I’m a lesbian. She herself is a lesbian. We’re both lesbians. I can objectively confirm this does not bother her.”

“That’s different.” He turns away from Annie as he says it, fiddling with his fork in a carton of kung pao chicken.

“How is that different? I’m gay, she’s gay, you’re gay, Sam’s gay. We’re all the same flavor of not straight, just different preferences.”

“Because it is,” he snaps.

It has the taste of classic John stubbornness, and Annie shouldn’t let herself be irritated by the irrationality of it. But she’s also running on five hours of sleep. “Then explain it to me, because I’m not getting it.”

“You don’t work with her. I do. And so does Sam.”

“I’m aware.”

John’s fork hits the table with a ringing clang. “No, Annie, you’re not.” His voice is sharp enough to draw blood. “We work for the FBI. Sam’s a Marshal. We spend all our time surrounded by cops and chasing criminals. Both of them would gladly shoot us or worse if we gave them a reason. And if anyone knew? That’s a pretty big fucking reason.” 

“ _Hannah. Is. Gay. Too._ ” 

“Good. For. Her.” John’s eyes are iced over and he’s entirely too still for the anger in his voice. “She also knows everyone I work with and plenty of people Sam works with. Which means her knowing is still a big fucking reason.”

“John,” she says, trying to keep her voice even and patient, “that is completely absurd. You know that, right?”

“How do you know it isn’t?” There’s a wild look in his eyes that says she’s hit a nerve of panic. “You hate Sam.”

“No I don’t.”

“Yes you do,” John replies, his voice bitter. “And there are plenty of people who agree with you, only they can’t get anything on him. But they can get plenty on me, with New York and Daniel over my shoulder, and the only reason no one noticed yet is because Lamb gave me a commendation to make me go away and Perry decided not to look. So if anyone looks at me, they’ll be able to hurt Sam. And the only reason anyone would look is because I gave them a reason.”

John’s voice is a shout at the end, reverberating against the walls of Annie’s apartment. For a moment Annie just sits frozen, staring at her best friend dead terrified in front of her like he’s twenty again and Howard and Maria have him so turned around he doesn’t know which way is up.

“Can we please stop talking about this?” John never says please unless he’s truly desperate. Annie presses her lips together and changes the subject, but the sour taste in her mouth remains.

Because Sam Gerard is nothing at all like Daniel Ward. Except for the part where Sam is also gay, and Sam also works around people with guns, and Sam also spends most of his time around people who more likely than not have certain views about homosexuality, specifically homosexuality in relation to guns, and those views may not be dissimilar to those of Mark Sheridan. Add in Sam’s instinct for putting himself between loaded guns and the people he cares about and that translates to John, terrified he’ll be responsible for ending Sam’s life.

And that terror wins out over all logic and reason, no matter how many times Annie tries to show him it’s different this time, that he has people on his own team who will gladly ensure that no loaded guns find their way in his or Sam’s direction.

It doesn’t help that the mob cases won’t freaking stop, and it definitely doesn’t help that two CPD detectives seem to have it out for Sam and John.

She stops by his apartment one night with a batch of medical journals in her bag after calling to confirm that he is, in fact, at home and seething over a mess of case files and pissed that, for at least the third time in three weeks, he has to clean up the steaming heap of shit they’ve turned his paperwork into. She used to drop by on a whim, half-hoping to run into Sam there, but has since concluded that it might give John a panic attack. Also, it might require her to bleach her brain, given the hours she gets off from the hospital.

Sure enough, John opens the door in a truly irritable mood. Not irritable enough to not pour glasses of wine, though.

Annie glances at the bottle and raises her eyebrows. “How bad did they fuck up to warrant a $25 bottle of merlot?”

“Badly.”

And hell, she’ll drink to that, because her mother taught her to never turn down good booze and medical school taught her to never turn down free booze. Annie settles on the couch and sets her wine glass on the side table, because the coffee table looks like a filing cabinet threw up. “What did they fuck up?”

“What didn’t they fuck up?” John grumbles, handing over a glass of wine.

“Want me to poison them?”

“Probably wouldn’t work. Fuckers are like cockroaches.” He picks up one sheet and, apparently fed up with what he sees, tosses it back down. “Or an aggressive foot fungus. The kind that may or may not rot your foot off and kill you.”

“Please don’t ever use that metaphor again.”

“If you’d met them, you’d understand.”

“Sweetie, I haven’t met them and I understand. Meeting them would just end in poisoning.”

“Don’t tempt me.” John’s phone rings and he ducks into the hall, holding up one hand. “Yeah?” A pause, then, “You cannot be serious.” The other person says something and John groans, “Fuck _me_.” A pause. “It could be an invitation.” Which means it’s definitely Sam. Annie inhales to shout that she did not sign up to listen to phone sex tonight, if only to traumatize Sam, but Sam apparently beats her to it. Asshole. “See, we were just starting to have fun and then you say things like that.” A sigh. “Do you need me back there? I’ll behave, I swear.” Even though John Royce has never behaved a day in his life. “Let me know if you find anything, then. You coming by later?” Another pause. “Fair enough. At least pretend to sleep? And eat something, I’m pretty sure Henry owes you Chinese.” It has the flavor of a familiar discussion. “Working on it. Or I would be, if not for the shitstorm that was dumped on my head. Annie will bully me into feeding her at some point in the foreseeable future.” John laughs at something. “Yeah, you too.”

Annie grins when John walks back in. “How’s your hot side piece?”

“You’re not as funny as you think you are,” he replies.

“Let me guess, they fucked things up for Sam too?”

“By virtue of my being involved with it,” John grumbles, dropping back on the couch to rifle through his papers.

“Any particular reason they have it out for you?”

“I think they’re still pissed about the thing with the judge.”

“That was months ago.”

“They’re petty bastards.”

“That wasn’t even your fault.”

“Like I said, petty bastards.” John sighs, running one hand through his hair. “I don’t think they have it out for me as much as they have it out for Sam. I’m just an easier target.”

“That’s bullshit.” John shrugs, clearly familiar with the argument. “Can’t Perry do anything? Or Sam’s boss?”

“There’s nothing to do. They haven’t done anything wrong other than be persistent pains in the ass. Perry can’t do anything about that besides clean up after them.” John sighs again. The hand in his hair holds on harder as he frowns at his papers. “I’m worried about Sam.”

It’s so rare for John to willingly and directly mention Sam in a not-completely-work context that Annie immediately stills to listen. Even so. “I’m worried about you too.”

That gets her a pat on the shin, but John still hasn’t heard her. “It’s different for Sam. He doesn’t have anybody the way I have you.”

“I thought he was close with Cosmo?” And Annie would know, because John was jealous of Cosmo for 0.02 seconds until he learned that Cosmo has a wife and two little girls he adores more than life itself.

John just shakes his head. Annie could fill volumes with what she can read from his face. “He doesn’t talk to Cosmo about things.”

Annie does not mention that John hasn’t really been talking to her about things either, because they’ve long since passed the point of Annie taking John’s Sam-related paranoia personally. “He has you. He talks to you.”

The words in John’s side-eye could fill a library. Whatever library keeps a catalogue solely covering Sam Gerard’s difficulty with words. “Sometimes. He…” John sees the look on Annie’s face and the words rush out of him, even though Annie can see him monitoring himself, “he tries. He’s gotten better with it.”

“But not everything?”

John gives a helpless shrug.

Annie parses her words carefully, sensing unexpected entry into volatile territory. Even so, she has to ask. “Because of this, or…?”

“It’s nothing to do with me, it’s just how he is,” John replies, ever so slightly defensive. Annie nudges his side with her foot and he relaxes, even as he reaches to swirl his wine. “I think he doesn’t want to worry me.”

Annie points to the paperwork spread in front of John. “If he thinks he can keep you from being involved, that ship has sailed.”

“Not that.” John glares at his wineglass. “He doesn’t want to worry me with how much he’s worried. About Kelly and Rosetti. About work. About anyone…” John trails off and gestures to the air, taking a long drink of his wine. About anyone finding out about John and Sam. About what that would mean for John.

Which is completely in character for everything Annie knows about Sam.

John’s wine glass hits the coffee table with concerning force. “I can’t _do_ anything. Not really.”

And that is a familiar tone, one Annie heard many a time in relation to Daniel getting caught up in work messes John couldn’t fix. “You’re already doing what you can.”

“It’s not enough. He’s terrified. Constantly.” Annie doesn’t mention that John is also terrified constantly, because that doesn’t even ping John’s radar when someone he cares about is upset. “One of these days his kids are going to knock on his door and give him a heart attack.”

Annie holds out his wine glass to him, leaning back into the couch as he takes a drink to nudge him with her foot. “I know you don’t want to hear this, but Sam is a middle-aged jackass with a shiny Deputy Marshal badge. He’s been taking care of himself since long before you showed up.”

“That’s not the point,” John mutters.

“John.” Annie gives him her most patient flat-eyed look, trademarked with the U.S. Copyright Office as Pull Your Head Out Of Your Ass. “It’s not your job to police Kelly and Rosetti’s every move any more than it’s my job to save everyone. Sam is talking to you and he’s not running. That’s a win.”

John blinks and tilts his head. Danger Will Robinson, impending sarcasm. “Holy shit, you actually listen to me.”

Annie chucks a pen at his head.

Her only consolation is that the rare mentions John does make of Sam indicate that for all his fear, he is genuinely happy. His entire face lights up at even a passing mention of Sam, even though he won’t do anything more than confirm he got dinner with Sam on Friday, or that he saw Sam at work again.

John’s happiness has no bearing on Kelly and Rosetti’s bullshit, of course, which only worsens as the months wear on. Hannah spends at least half her work time listening for any sign of danger coming toward John, for which Annie is endlessly grateful, even though Hannah’s efforts are hampered by John’s steadfast refusal to acknowledge that Hannah (or anyone else, for that matter) might be willing to help him. And even from a distance, Annie knows there’s no way this can go on much longer--either Sam or John is going to have a nervous breakdown or Kelly and Rosetti make their move, or both.

It’s a Thursday morning when she happens to look up during her shift and freezes in her tracks to see Kelly and Rosetti on the TV in the waiting room, giving a press conference.

One of the nurses follows her gaze and shakes her head. “Crazy, isn’t it? All this mob stuff?”

“Yeah, it is,” Annie says. There’s no reason why Kelly and Rosetti can’t give press conferences, but even so. It feels like an omen from the universe, and her mind won’t let go of it, no matter how many times she reminds herself that it’s probably nothing to do with Sam and John.

So when Hannah shows up at her apartment after work almost hyperventilating and leaps at Annie to hug her as hard as she can, Annie feels her heart stop in her chest. “What happened?” she says, holding onto Hannah for dear life. “Is everything okay? Are John and Sam okay?”

“They’re okay. They’re okay. They’re both okay. We’re all okay,” Hannah says between gulps of air, loosening her grip just enough to kiss Annie hard.

Annie breaks loose, holding Hannah’s face to get a look at her. “What happened? They’re okay?”

“Kelly and Rosetti,” Hannah says. Annie drags her into the kitchen to sit down because she’s almost vibrating. “They gave a press conference this morning.” Annie’s stomach flips and Hannah’s grip on her arms tightens. “We had to get the witnesses to safety and they showed up at the Marshals office and Haslett and Walsh and Perry were there and we thought they were pissed about the witnesses but,” she has to pause to swallow air, her eyes wild, “they knew about Sam and John. They knew about John and Daniel.”

Annie’s own voice startles her as it tears loose from her chest. “ _How did they--_ ”

“Hey, hey,” Hannah rests her forehead against Annie’s before she can stand up. “They’re okay. Sam and John are okay.”

“ _How is that okay?_ ” Annie screams. “ _I’m going to fucking kill them!_ ”

“Annie.” Hannah’s hands move from gripping her arms to holding onto her face. “I lied for them. We all lied for them. Perry lied for them. We kept them safe. They’re not going to get fired. Perry’s taking care of it. They’re okay.” A hysterical giggle bubbles out of her throat, cracking her whole face into a disbelieving grin like she can’t believe it’s true.

Annie blinks at her. Can’t remember how to breathe. “They’re okay?”

“They’re okay,” Hannah says with another hysterical giggle.

Annie shoots out of her chair and bolts to the phone, dialing John’s home number before she can think about it. But it goes to voicemail. She tries again, banging the wall when she gets the same result. “God _dammit_ John where are you?”

“Here.” Hannah snatches the phone out of her hands and dials, handing it back as it rings. “Sam’s home number.”

That doesn’t process when she holds the phone to her ear, but it does when she hears Sam’s voice sounding rough around the edges and slightly winded. “Gerard.”

“Is John there? Are you okay?”

“Annie?”

“ _Is John there_?” Annie repeats, louder even as Hannah wraps herself around her.

There’s shuffling at the other end and Sam mumbling, and then John’s voice. “Annie?”

Annie sinks sideways into her counter. She doesn’t know when she started laughing. “Thank _God_.”

“Annie. Breathe,” John says, even though he’s not quite managing it either. “We’re okay.”

“You’re okay,” she breathes.

“We’re okay,” John repeats. A relieved sound escapes him. Annie can only imagine Sam is on top of him too, holding onto him as Hannah’s holding onto her. “Your girlfriend was amazing.”

“Yeah,” Annie says, smiling at Hannah. “Yeah, she is.”

“And I was, _fuck_ ,” she hears him hit his head against something, probably Sam. “I was a gold-star dick. I should’ve trusted you.”

“John. It’s okay.”

“No it isn’t.” He exhales hard and the phone shuffles as he swallows. “I was a complete asshole. It’s been months and I haven’t even asked about her. I’m so sorry, Annie.”

“John,” she repeats, louder, steadier this time. “It’s okay.” She rubs one palm along Hannah’s arm. “You were protecting Sam. I would have done the same for Hannah if I thought I had to.”

John chuckles in his throat. “Well then. Seems you’ve had yourself a girlfriend for four months and I’ve been neglecting my contractual best friend duties.”

“How about we start making up for lost time?” Annie can’t quite believe she’s asking, after she’d half given up on John strolling through the door that’s always been open to him. “You, me, Hannah, a round of drinks?”

“Actually…” there’s the shuffling of a palm over the receiver and a short span of murmuring off the line, then John is back, sounding more nervous than before. “Much though I will always proudly occupy the position of your favorite third wheel, I thinking--wondering--since I’m meeting Hannah, if you’d like to meet Sam.”

Annie smiles so hard her face hurts. “Why yes, John, I would love to _finally_ meet your boyfriend.”

She can hear John smiling too. “And I would be honored to finally give your girlfriend a shovel talk.”

“You are so full of shit.”

“Why do you think I have a shovel handy?”

“Can we agree to Saturday before you embarrass yourself?”

“Saturday. Oh, and Annie?”

“Yeah?”

“I’ll say something myself tomorrow, but tell Hannah thanks. From both of us.”

“Anytime. You idiot.”

John just laughs. “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do.”

“Too late,” Annie hums, eyeing Hannah as she hangs up the phone. Then she turns and proceeds to kiss her girlfriend, open-mouthed, with tongue.

“John and Sam say thank you,” she says, when she lets Hannah come up for air so she can go for the tender spots on Hannah’s neck.

Hannah laughs, still trying to breathe and not succeeding when Annie nips her. “That was John and Sam saying thank you?”

“No,” Annie replies, tilting her angle when a hand tangles in her hair. “I’m telling you John and Sam say thank you. _This_ ,” she follows a trail up Hannah’s throat to the corner of her mouth, “is me starting to say thank you.”

Hannah catches her lip, grinning as she lets it go. “Starting to?”

“Mmhm. You see,” Annie sets her fingers to work on Hannah’s blouse, “I plan to thank you quite thoroughly.”

And she does. For an hour and a half.

Friday comes with the relief that Perry is, indeed, taking care of it with Perry’s usual mixture of affected haplessness, unaffected stubbornness, and a sharp eye for bullshit. Apparently, so is Sam’s boss, who is (according to Hannah) an ice queen carved straight from the heart of Antarctica who probably takes over international spy rings for fun. Exactly the person Annie wants to defend John, then.

Annie would have spent Saturday with Hannah, but both Hannah and John got pulled into work Saturday to make sure there were no more messes as a result of Thursday’s press conference. Which means Annie is the first one to arrive at the agreed-upon bar, fidgeting with a beer and glancing between her watch and the door.

John and Hannah appear at the same time, Hannah with her hair let loose around her face and John in a heather blue work shirt that was definitely chosen for Sam’s benefit because it brings out the hazel in his eyes. Annie waves them over to her table in the back, greeting them both with a hug because they are in public.

Just like that, Annie is looped into their rapid-fire repartee, even if she doesn’t catch every work reference. Except John keeps glancing toward the door, thinking he’s being subtle. Sam is unsubtly late. After ten minutes, John breaks out of the conversation and stands up from the table.

“Oh come on!” Hannah says. “We were just getting to the good part of the story!”

John snorts. “Good part of the story depends on which side of the story you’re telling.” He hooks a thumb over his shoulder. “I’ll just check for Sam, I’ll be back.”

“You better be,” Annie calls after him. Hannah pulls her back into the story, which is good as long as you happen to be on Hannah’s end of it and not Burkhardt’s. Or the nuns.

After fifteen minutes, Hannah glances at the door. “He wouldn’t duck out or something, would he?”

“Nah. He knows I know where he lives.” Even so, Annie is eyeing the door too, and is more relieved than she’ll ever admit when John reappears, grinning like the mid-afternoon sun and bickering with Sam.

“Just in time to be fashionably late,” John says, looking like he won the lottery.

“We had a fugitive hunt run long a few counties over,” Sam replies, which might be Sam Gerard for _sorry I’m late_.

“By late he means he’s been working since five a.m.,” John says with an appraising eye at Sam. That would explain why Sam is in jeans and a rumpled t-shirt with mud on his boots.

“Not another mob one, is it?” Hannah asks.

“Meth dealer. Got the bright idea to stab a prison guard during a transfer.”

Annie knows, intellectually, what Sam does all day, but it’s still a bit disorienting to hear it mentioned that casually. Then again, she wasn’t used to it when John first joined the FBI either. “Do fugitive hunts usually run long?”

Sam snorts and says, “It was a meth dealer,” as though that explains everything. He turns to John and the measured distance between them becomes suddenly more visible. “Did you order?”

“Waiting for you,” John replies.

Sam nods to the bar. “Usual?”

“Please.” Sam steps around John for the bar, slipping carefully past without touching him. If Annie didn’t know them, the ease with which Sam passes so closely by John would seem like a product of the crowded bar. John still glances after him as he goes, though, as if he has to make sure Sam is alright in the short journey to the bar.

When he turns back to Annie and Hannah, though, his eyes are alive with mischief. “Well, Hannah, since I’m a few months behind the curve and I already know how you met, I suppose this is the part where I remind you that if you hurt her I’ll have no choice but to beat you to death with a shovel?”

Annie snorts and Hannah rolls her eyes. “As if you could even try, Royce.”

John smirks, an evil genius glint lighting up his eyes. “You never know Hill, I’m full of surprises.”

“You’ve got a funny way of pronouncing ‘full of shit’,” Hannah retorts.

“Oh that news is so twenty years ago, don’t be boring,” John replies, still smirking in a way that says Annie might have to throw a cocktail peanut at his head. “Besides, that was just housekeeping, which means now I can fulfill my actual best friend duties and tell you the embarrassing escapades of wee child Annie Eastman.”

He catches the cocktail peanut Annie throws at his head just as Sam reappears with two beers. “I miss anything interesting?” Sam says idly, as though inviting them to surprise him, slipping a beer into John’s hand in a practiced motion.

“Disclaimers and blackmail,” John replies cheerfully, still grinning at Hannah while crunching the peanut.

This, apparently, is no surprise. “He’s insufferable when he can’t use blackmail material.”

Annie snorts. “Tell me something I don’t know.”

Sam doesn’t reply, though, sinking into his seat and quirking a brow over expressionless eyes when he catches Annie studying him. Then he turns back to John, sipping his beer. “You lot didn’t have too much fun without us today, did you?”

“As if we would dare to have too much fun without Cosmo,” John replies, his smirk shifting to a different tenor as he draws Hannah into repeating the story they were telling when they arrived at the bar. This time, though, Annie knows the details and interjects with side commentary, which Hannah parries back and John meets with his usual level of snark, as if John isn’t ably smoothing out the conversation to loop Sam into it.

Sam listens, and Annie can see thoughts turning in his head, but he watches more than he talks. After a few minutes where the conversation devolves into Annie and Hannah going back and forth, Hannah catches Sam glancing between her and Annie. “What?”

Sam studies her, then sips his beer. “Nothing. You’ve got more guts than I gave you credit for.”

It’s delivered in such a deadpan tone that it takes a solid five seconds to process that this might be a Sam Gerard compliment. Then Hannah beams.

They’re a mismatched set, the four of them. Or rather, Sam doesn’t quite match the three of them. He’s quiet in his perch in the corner, watching the three of them talk as if observing a tennis match, occasionally watching the room as if scanning for threats. It would be unnerving, given how focused his gaze is and how blank his face is and how the noise of the bar seems to get swallowed up like a black hole around him, except that John is next to him. And because John is next to him, it’s less of a black hole than a center of gravity. John’s center of gravity, specifically. John talks enough for the both of them, but he keeps looping Sam into his brightness and energy, coaxing flickers of warmth and quirks of the mouth that might be smiles. 

It takes a full hour before John gets Sam to participate in the conversation, mainly in short quips that prove he and John have the same sense of humor.

More astonishing is the fact that Sam is somehow _good_ for John. He’s calmer in Sam’s gravitational pull, more settled than Annie’s seen in a long time. The fact that Sam’s walls are up has little consequence on that calmness--if anything, he seems entirely at ease stationing himself against the wall holding him upright, a shield of warmth and light in front of Sam.

Sam’s walls aren’t any further down when he and John stand up and make their excuses after two hours. Annie suspects he’s not used to it, being seen like this. Even so, there is a trace of genuine warmth in Sam’s voice when he says he’s glad to meet the person who kept John in one piece for so long. Both of them roll their eyes at John’s indignant outcry. And then John and Sam are gone.

“I think that’s the calmest I’ve ever seen them,” Hannah says, like she still can’t wrap her head around the concept.

“That makes two of us,” Annie says, because she can’t wrap her head around the concept either. “Sam was quiet. Is Sam usually that quiet?”

“Not that kind of quiet,” Hannah replies, confirming that Sam wasn’t all that calm even if this was the calmest Hannah has ever seen them. “He does that when he’s thinking. Or worried about something.”

Somehow, Annie suspects Sam was both thinking and worried about something. The same thing--being seen. Even so, he came.

And so life carries on from that weekend, except now, John gives Annie shit for being disgustingly cute with Hannah even though he’s visibly delighted that it’s going so well.

And he talks about Sam. A lot. Or rather, he stops doctoring his sentences to minimize references to Sam, which means he spends at least half of his time being disgustingly precious. Sam becomes a constant presence even when John doesn’t mention him, even though a headlong dive into more mob cases the following wee means Sam is unavailable for socializing or sleeping most of the time. Then again, John barely has time to come up for air either, and neither does Hannah.

Even so, John gladly chatters her ear off and gladly lets his own ear be chattered off. He’s happy, and Annie’s happy, and when she mentions it John promptly tells her to shut up and not curse it, which is how she knows it’s true.

On a Wednesday three weeks later, Annie’s doing her rounds. Her patients aren’t any more or less difficult than usual, so it’s mostly a matter of checking boxes. And then she’s stopped between rooms by a curly-haired man wearing a Marshals badge around his neck and “Hannah? What are you doing here?”

“So, I need you not to panic,” Hannah says, except she looks nervous, which means Annie might need to start panicking.

“Why?”

“Because…the thing is…well, see…”

“Royce got shot,” the curly-haired Marshal supplies and is promptly elbowed hard enough to crack a rib. 

“What the hell happened to _easing into it_ , Jesus Christ Noah,” Hannah hisses, with another nervous look at Annie.

“Well you weren’t, I was trying to move things along so she doesn’t panic,” the Marshal, Noah apparently, hisses back, rubbing his side where Hannah elbowed him.

“Is John alright?”

They blink out of arguing and both look worried. “Well, yes,” Hannah starts.

“Doctor already cleaned up his shoulder,” Noah supplies. “He can go home in a few days.”

“Uh huh,” Annie hums. “And how did John get shot, exactly?”

“Well, so, we had a case with a witness,” Noah starts.

“I guessed as much,” she replies, which makes him look more nervous.

“A federal witness in one of our cases,” Hannah adds.

“So I gathered,” Annie replies.

“And…well…” Noah says, eyeing Annie like he’s not sure whether to fear for his life. “There was a hit taken out.”

“So we drove like we’re being chased to get to the witness’s house,” Hannah says.

“Sam had us sweep the place. Only the witness had this huge property outside the city, so we had to go in pairs while Henry and Poole got the witness secured. Sam broke off from Cosmo and cut through the house on his own when he thought he saw the guy.”

“Except, well,” and now, finally, they’re getting to the real part of the story, because Hannah looks like she wants to run away, “the guy got Sam turned around and almost got the jump on him. Except John saw it first and tackled him. Bullet went through his shoulder instead of hitting Sam, and the guy threw John down the stairs. Sam managed to take him down as soon as he threw John.”

Annie stares at them for a moment. They glance at each other, then back at her. “So what you’re telling me,” she says slowly, “is that Sam took a stupid risk, John took a stupider risk to save him, and John is now in my hospital with a gunshot wound because of it?”

“Well,” Hannah starts, “I wouldn’t put it like--”

“What room is he in?”

“He’s _fine_ ,” Noah says. “Doctor’s already finished, they said he’s perfectly--”

“What. Room. Is. He. In?”

“Annie,” Hannah pleads, “maybe we should all just take a breath and--”

“Maureen,” Annie strides to the nurses’ station where Maureen waits, hands frozen while typing, “what room is Special Agent John Royce in?”

“Is there a problem?” Maureen says, eyeing Hannah and Noah as she types.

“I’m about to murder my best friend. What room is he in?”

“Uh huh,” Maureen replies, giving a dubious look at Hannah and Noah’s badges like she correctly assumes they have something to do with this. “17B, fifth door from the waiting room. Don’t leave a mess for the orderlies.” 

“No promises,” she shouts over her shoulder as she storms away, trailed by Hannah and Noah.

The waiting room in question is a zoo, because half the population is Marshals and FBI agents who Annie recognizes as John and Sam’s teams. All of whom spring to attention as soon as they see her coming.

“Ah, hold up,” Renfro trots up alongside her and swings in front of her with a nervous eye behind him at John’s room. “You might not want to go in there, Doc.”

“Deputy Renfro,” Annie says, fixing him with her most blatantly fake doctor smile, “I was just told my idiot best friend got himself shot and admitted to the ER. So unless you’d like to stay in the bed next to him, I suggest you get the hell out of my way.”

Renfro holds up his hands in surrender, muttering something that sounds suspiciously like _your funeral_. Behind her is a whispered conversation. “What happened to keeping her away from here?” from Wang, and Hannah to Renfro, “Why the hell didn’t you stop her?” and Renfro’s reply of, “Why the hell didn’t _you_ stop her?” and Noah murmuring something that sounds suspiciously like, “Should we make popcorn or call the fire department?”

The door to John’s room is already open a crack when she gets there, and within two seconds of stepping through the door, she knows why the Stooges were trying to deter her--two raised voices, arguing. Sam is already here. Annie pauses a moment, then silently returns the door to its original position and steps sideways against the wall where they can’t see her around the corner yet.

“You do _not_ get to lecture me about taking idiotic risks,” John snaps. “What the fuck were you thinking breaking off from Cosmo?”

“I was thinking I saw something and didn’t want our witness to get shot,” Sam snaps back.

“So you would rather have gotten yourself shot and be in a hospital bed instead of me.”

“Yes,” Sam replies, as though it brooks no arguments.

“Yeah,” John replies, like he didn’t expect anything else. “Because that’s so fucking healthy, Sam. He could have killed you, did you think of that?”

“I wouldn’t have let that happen.”

“How would you have known?” John snarls. “He had his gun leveled at your head. He could have pulled the trigger before you ever fucking saw him. And I would have come around the corner to see you bleeding on the floor--”

And that way lies a panic attack. Enough. “So,” Annie calls, because the satisfaction of seeing both of them jolt as if she put shock pads on them is in fact satisfying, “what the fuck did you do this time?”

John says, “I’m fine,” at the same moment Sam says, “He got shot in the shoulder and bruised his leg.”

“Traitor,” John mutters.

“We’ll start with the fact that you got shot.” Annie grabs his chart to flick through it, ignoring John’s wince at the clatter. “Gunshot wound in the left shoulder, bullet nicked the brachial artery, under observation for damage to the brachial nerves, right knee sprained and badly bruised, potential for a concussion.” The chart slams back down on the table and she glares violent death with a rusty spoon at Sam. “Start talking.”

John starts to protest, but it catches in his throat when Annie holds up a finger.

“I’ll get to you.” She turns her finger to point at Sam. “Talk.”

Sam’s eyes are deliberately void and steady as he stares back at her. “We had a federal witness with a mob hit.”

“Skip past the parts I already know.”

The look he’s giving her has probably terrified cops within an inch of their lives, and that somehow makes her angrier. “I gave the order for everyone to split up and search the property. Cosmo and I were outside. I thought I saw our hitman and went after him, but he got away from me in the house. Next thing I know, John’s bleeding and flying down the stairs.”

“From a bullet that was supposed to go through your thick skull,” John snaps. “Or stairs he would have thrown you down.”

“And you,” Annie whirls on John, “what the fuck were you thinking?”

“I was thinking I didn’t want Sam’s dumb ass to get shot,” John replies, eyes narrowing as Sam’s hackles raise.

“I can take care of myself,” Sam growls.

“Yeah, because that’s working out so fucking well for you,” John snaps, wincing as he shifts around in the bed.

Annie tries to stop John as he starts shuffling, but he pushes her off. “What are you doing?”

“Going to the bathroom.” John’s face knots in pain as he sits up.

“Why?”

“Because between getting dragged in here in an ambulance, doctors removing a bullet from my shoulder and stitching it, and my apparent popularity,” John swings his legs to the side of the bed to face away from Annie toward Sam, “I haven’t been allowed to get up and pee in entirely too long.”

“You are _not_ getting away from me, John.”

“Believe it or not,” John grumbles, wincing as he shuffles his weight, trying to figure out how to lift without moving his shoulder, “not all of my motivations are related to avoiding you.”

“John,” Annie growls.

Sam steps to John’s side, taking his right hand and elbow to help John leverage himself up. His eyes flick to Annie’s over John’s head. _Give him a minute_ , the look says, just for a split second, then his focus is back on John as if Annie doesn’t exist, as if he and John weren’t just having a bruiser of an argument. Annie watches John grit his teeth, figuring out how to distribute weight without aggravating his knee or moving his shoulder.

When he’s upright and stable, John lets go of Sam and limps around the bed, stopping when Annie steps in his way with an expression of legitimate tiredness and pain. “I’ll be here all night for you to give me a proper concussion. Just let me go to the bathroom first.”

Annie sighs through her nose, stepping out of the way without breaking her glare.

“Do you need help?” Sam asks quietly, from the other side of the bed. Possibly so Annie doesn’t reach around John to throttle him.

“I can pee without an audience,” John replies, though his limping doesn’t inspire confidence.

Sam apparently doesn’t believe him either, because he steps around the bed and reaches for John’s arm again.

“I’m fine, Sam,” John hisses, giving Sam a look like a dog about to bite. Sam lingers for a moment, then retreats. “Don’t kill each other,” John calls over his shoulder, then vanishes into the bathroom with the door closed.

When the door closes, Sam settles back into his chair, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees like he means to get up any second. For a moment, they regard each other in silence. She studies him. By the steady gaze she gets back, Annie would guess Sam is studying her too.

“That was idiotic,” she snaps.

“Which part?”

“Do _not_ test me.”

They return to staring at each other.

“I know ways to kill you and no one would ever know it was me,” she says, conversationally. “And if you’re the reason my best friend gets himself killed, I will have no choice but to use the slow and painful ones.”

That wins her a quirked eyebrow. “Is that a threat, Dr. Eastman?” Sam replies, conversationally.

“No, Deputy Gerard. It’s a promise.”

Sam’s lips twitch. “Good. I’d hope for nothing less from John’s friends.”

She quirks an eyebrow back. “Did your friends do the same to John?”

“My kids. And since Poole has already informed him that she knows how to destroy evidence of a murder, I think the sentiment is clear.”

“Good.” For a moment, they regard each other, then Annie asks, “Did you mean it?”

“Mean what?”

Annie gives him a look like he’s being particularly dense. Also like she might strangle him with the IV line if he doesn’t stop it. “John said you would rather get yourself shot and in a hospital bed than him. You said yes. Did you mean it?”

“Always,” Sam says, as though there was never any other choice.

Annie nods once. “Good.” Her gaze drifts to the hospital bed and she shakes her head, looking back up at Sam. “But so help me God, if he gets hurt trying to protect you, I will murder you in your sleep.”

“You two gossiping about me?” John calls from the bathroom, because his instincts are, in fact, correct.

“Only the filthiest socks,” Sam replies, dry as the desert.

“I told him that embarrassing story from your fourth birthday,” Annie adds.

“I hate you both,” John mutters as he steps back out. Sam snorts and Annie smirks, hiding it as soon as John comes into view. They both know he doesn’t.

Sam stands and lets John brace himself to sit back on the bed. His hand squeezes John’s elbow, then he lets go. “I’ll give you a minute.”

“Please don’t,” John sighs, hissing as he holds his weight wrong in his bad shoulder.

The hand that was at his elbow comes up to rest gently on his neck. Sam’s gaze flicks to the closed door, then back down to John to press a kiss to John’s forehead. John catches him by the collar before he pulls away, pressing his forehead into Sam’s chest while his fingers curl into Sam’s collar and Sam’s nose remains tucked into his hair.

“I’m glad you’re alright,” Sam says, a gravelly rumble John must be able to feel.

“Yeah,” John sighs from where his head still rests against Sam’s chest. Then he straightens and releases Sam, watching him slip away and out of the room. Even once he closes the door behind him, Annie can hear him barking orders in the waiting room, followed by the unmistakable sounds of frightened scuttling.

John settles back on the bed with a grunt as he lays back on his shoulder.

Annie waits.

After a minute of fussing, he looks up at her. “Please don’t make this a big deal.”

“Why would I make this a big deal?”

“Because there’s no reason to make it a big deal.”

“Really?” Annie replies. “Because I’m pretty sure you getting shot to protect your boyfriend is a _big fucking deal_.”

“It really isn’t--ow!” John winces when Annie goes to check the wrapping and stitches.

“You’re a goddamn moron when you’re in love,” she mutters.

“It’s not,” John trails off with an incoherent noise, looking where Sam just disappeared, “I mean, we haven’t really talked about it. Since the thing with Kelly and Rosetti.”

Annie gives him a glare to shatter lead. “Johnathan Edward Royce, I have put up with your pathetic pining ass for almost a year. Sam loves you enough to take idiotic risks with armed hitmen to protect you and you love him enough to take even stupider risks to protect him and so help me God if you two need a gunman every time you have to have a goddamn conversation we are going to have _a serious talk_ about _healthy relationships_ and I will handcuff both of you to this fucking hospital bed until you _use your words like normal fucking people_.”

John grabs her and pulls her into him, holding on in a way that probably hurts his shoulder. He holds on until she lets out a long breath, and then he lets go and meets her eye with his hands still holding onto her arms, solid, alive, safe. “I’ll be fine, Annie. And I will talk to him.”

“Damn straight you will,” she replies. “Right now.”

John sighs but nods, shuffling as if in preparation only to grunt when Annie hugs him again.

“I’m glad you’re okay,” she says, straightening.

John just grins. “What can I say, I’ve got the best doctor in Chicago.”

“And don’t you forget it,” she says, squeezing his hand before turning on her heel.

Annie strides back out to the waiting room to find FBI and Marshals scurrying, Sam perched on the edge of a chair like a statue with a carefully blank face, his kids eyeing him like a live bomb, and a lot of families looking very concerned by the amount of worried law enforcement in their vicinity.

“You,” she barks, sending everyone a foot in the air except Sam, who just raises an eyebrow. Asshole.

“Yes you,” she snaps, pointing behind her at John’s door. “Go. Talk. With your words. _Now_.”

Sam rises from the chair as if she hasn’t said the words in the tone of a death threat. He meets her eye as she passes. Annie stares him down, unblinking. _Fuck this up and I’ll fuck you up_ , her eyes say. Sam nods and turns back to John’s door, slipping back to John’s side where he belongs.

The things she does for John Royce.

And a few months later, when John calls her and says he may have just gotten a shovel talk from Sam’s little old lady neighbor, Annie laughs so hard she cries. Because it really is love after all.


End file.
